Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
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 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. …
Continue readingPosted on May 8, 2014 | 13 Comments
I was about to turn my computer on last Tuesday evening when Mrs Spudman suggested instead we sit out in the field with a glass of wine in the sunset. We watched a fox quartering the slope beneath us, listened to the birdsong die in the rising gloom, saw the first bats of the evening emerge and heard a man walking up the lane beyond the hedge stop, unaware of our presence, and offer a prayer for the beauties of the season. Time well spent, I think. But when I turned my computer on the following evening after 48hrs of …
Continue readingPosted on April 28, 2014 | 20 Comments
Following on from a recent post of mine and from Clem’s comment therein about thinking of food and land in terms of private property with protections through the rule of law, I’ve been musing a bit on this issue and thought I’d mention a few things here that touch on it. One of them is an interesting article by Guardian journalist John Harris called ‘The Tories own the future – the left is trapped in the past’. Leftwingers of the Twitterversity were quick to brand him a traitor to the left but I thought much of the article was bang on, even …
Continue readingPosted on April 24, 2014 | 2 Comments
Time perhaps for a brief report on the demonstration staged by the Land Workers’ Alliance outside the DEFRA offices in Westminster’s corridors of power last week. My colleagues in the LWA did a fine job assembling a generous farmer’s market stall of small farm produce adjacent to DEFRA’s imposing front door, much to the bemusement of its besuited denizens as they scurried out for their lunch breaks. It’s a bad time of year for us veg growers to be trying to demonstrate our productivity (rhubarb and salads featured prominently…) but all in all it was an impressive display. And some of …
Continue readingPosted on April 15, 2014 | 8 Comments
Well it’s been a rum old week here at Small Farm Future. First up, as you may have noticed, the blog site went belly up. This was caused by me attempting to sort out a minor problem that I didn’t fully understand very late at night when I wasn’t concentrating properly. Result: minor problem became a major problem, and I had to call in the experts to solve it. Which they did, almost – but not quite. Not quite, because a few of the comments (notably some of Patrick’s, Clem’s and Brian’s) from my last post got etherised. I’ve restored …
Continue reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS