Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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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 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 readingPosted on April 7, 2014 | 22 Comments
Maybe time for a quick post from down on the farm, so here’s a picture of part of our new farmhouse being shunted into position. Well, I know it’s not much of a farmhouse, but I can only refer you to Mendip District Council’s Local Plan, Policy DP13, which insists we have to erect a temporary building with no foundations that must be removable after 3 years. “In this way”, to quote from Mendip’s document, “We will make it as difficult as possible for hippy upstarts with ornery ideas to get their foot in the door of England’s green and …
Continue readingPosted on March 30, 2014 | 3 Comments
A little follow up to my previous post – and a request for your help. I suggested in said post that the city and the country are not two separate orders of life but two sides of the same coin that jointly create the whole. Still, there seems no end to the debate over the relative merits of urban and rural life, as if the twain should never meet. Generally, the city has got the best notices in this debate over the past century or so, for who but a hopeless romantic can these days seriously extol the virtues of country …
Continue readingPosted on March 19, 2014 | 2 Comments
Well, the rains have ceased for now, the waters are receding, and the tractor is primed for its 34th season (God willing). But perhaps I’ve just got time to share some thoughts on two classic books of a similar vintage to my trusty Ford. They’ve languished for too long in my in-tray, but the idleness enforced by the sodden early spring has enabled me to catch up with them at last. Both of them as it happens are on the subject of the country and the city. One of them, appropriately enough, is The Country And The City (1973) by …
Continue readingPosted on March 13, 2014 | 5 Comments
Small Farm Future has been gaining a modicum of attention recently, with a few new readers coming to us by way of our CEO Chris Smaje’s article on peasants in The Land magazine, and with Ford Denison, Professor of Ecology at the University of Minnesota, generously stating that Smaje is “an agricultural thinker worth reading” who thinks about agriculture “in creative ways, rather than just parroting conventional vs organic “party lines””. We’ve also had the dubious honour of an entire blog post devoted to us by self-styled ‘eco-sceptic’ Graham Strouts, who says that Smaje is a fierce defender of organics. Well, they …
Continue readingPosted on March 6, 2014 | 4 Comments
Today I’m going to weave a tale from several threads, including more insights from the golden pen of Geert Mak, a comment posted recently by the equally golden Clem Weidenbenner, and various historical researches from a cast including a Nobel Prize-winning economist and the more unsung efforts of the Aberdeen and Northeast Scotland Family History Society (which I promised to regale you with many moons ago, but never did). Let’s start with Geert Mak. In my previous post, I described the changes in the Frisian dairy economy analysed by Mak, but that was in a farming sector that was already highly …
Continue readingPosted on February 23, 2014 | 17 Comments
I ought to be in overdrive right now getting ready for the new growing season, but the monstrous floods we’ve had here in Somerset have interrupted all my best laid plans. So apart from occasional acts of frantic ditch-digging, instead I’ve had a chance to catch up on my reading. And those doom-mongering greentards say climate change is a bad thing! Anyway, one of the books I’ve read is Geert Mak’s An Island In Time: The Biography of a Village, which charts the history – social and agricultural – of a small farming village called Jorwert in the Netherlands. It’s …
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