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I’ve been blogging about farming, ecology and politics since 2012. I welcome well-tempered discussion. Please note that if you’re a new commenter, or if you include a lot of links, your comment will go into the moderation queue before publication. I sometimes miss comments in the queue so feel free to nudge me via the Contact Form if your comment fails to appear.
Posted on September 28, 2014 | 36 Comments
It’s been 10 years now since we started hosting farm volunteers at Vallis Veg, mostly through the excellent organisation World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. The idea is that the WWOOFer, as they are widely known, works a not-quite-full working week in return for board and lodging, with no money changing hands. We’ve had well over a hundred wonderful WWOOFers contribute to our work at Vallis Veg, and regrettably many hundreds more whose overtures I’ve had to turn down. I’ve learned things both general and particular from everybody who’s visited us. Here are seven general lessons about the global economy …
Continue readingPosted on September 21, 2014 | 7 Comments
An unexpected benefit of having now almost fully moved to live permanently on our farm site (well, ‘permanently’ at least until our next reckoning with Mendip District Council, on which topic more soon) is that I no longer follow the news too much. Living in our town house, I just couldn’t help performing a morning ritual of flicking through the newspaper and listening to John Humphries wittering away on the Today programme, whereas now when I get up, checking on the sheep, or the seedlings, or the battery monitor, or the rain gauge, somehow seems more important. Still, old habits …
Continue readingPosted on September 14, 2014 | 5 Comments
I think it’s time for me to end my self-imposed exile from my own blog. I’m not completely out of the woods yet work-wise so there may be further service interruptions, but it’s been nice to see some ongoing conversations on the site since I posted my last entry, such as this one about permaculture, populism and Vandana Shiva and this one about nature mimicry. They’ve guilt-tripped me back into the blogosphere. I aim to write some more on those themes in future posts, but for now I just want to post a few brief thoughts prompted by the issue …
Continue readingPosted on July 11, 2014 | 14 Comments
Apologies for my sporadic blogging of late. I think I’m going to have to admit defeat and temporarily put Small Farm Future out to grass for a month or two (seldom a bad idea for a sustainable farm…) It seems that my paper on perennial crops may be accepted for publication by an academic journal but only with ‘major revisions’, so your humble blog editor needs to pull his finger out on that score. Meanwhile, Mrs Spudman is going on a jaunt to a family wedding in Ohio, leaving me to look after Spudgirl, the farm and the farmhouse all …
Continue readingPosted on June 29, 2014 | 17 Comments
I was all set to post as previously threatened another screed about golden rice in the wake of my spat on Steve Savage’s website with some of his commenters, when all of a sudden Steve releases a new post on the somewhat related issue of scientific evidence, which is perhaps of more general interest. So I think I’ll hold off for now on the golden rice and go with the science/evidence theme. In other news, I’ve been tangling with the former poet laureate on the Guardian letters page and with proponents of the pig swill ban among other things over …
Continue readingPosted on June 17, 2014 | 10 Comments
My opportunities for writing blog posts are cruelly curtailed at the moment while I try among the other crazy things I do to make a living growing vegetables and to build a house that I’ll have to take down again in 3 years, so apologies for my present intermittency. But I haven’t been altogether absent from the blogosphere – against my better judgement, I got myself involved in another damn golden rice debate on Steve Savage’s blog. This truth I know: don’t debate golden rice with its many ardent fans – the insult to insight quotient will overwhelm you with …
Continue readingPosted on June 8, 2014 | 33 Comments
Here, belatedly, is my promised follow up to the preceding Rambunctious Garden post. I’ve been travelling recently, and found myself sharing an old-style train compartment with a curious fellow who introduced himself as ‘Nick’. With the faint goaty aroma that enveloped him, his suspiciously round shoes and the bumps on his head poorly concealed with a demotic flat cap, it didn’t take me long to figure out who he really was. I like to think I managed to hold my own with him, but here at any rate is the transcript of my conversation with the old devil. Nick: So, …
Continue readingPosted on May 19, 2014 | 27 Comments
Well, an air of normality has returned to us here at Small Farm Future. A combination of sunny weather and endless meals of Clem’s slug stew have put those pesky molluscs on the back foot and enabled us to get some plants established at last. The money I paid for the potato planter has returned to me (though not, alas, the planter: now I know what people on ebay mean by the term ‘time waster’). And the hordes of permaculturists who were commenting on this blog a week or two ago seem to have departed to graze on other pastures. …
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