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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on February 16, 2014 | 13 Comments
I’ve always thought the idea of ‘vertical farming’ (ie. growing crops in urban buildings using hydroponics, LED lighting and various other bits of hi tech gizmology) is a bit of a sci-fi gimmick, but a recent article in the New Scientist almost convinced me otherwise. With improvements in LEDs and other relevant technologies, and with the high prices that rich city folk are prepared to pay for their rocket garnishes, I can imagine that with better water conservation and disease prevention and possibly lower transport costs vertical city farms may soon compete favourably with the more traditional market gardens that have …
Continue readingPosted on February 8, 2014 | No Comments
Another week, another blog post criticising permaculture. I hadn’t realised that I was so on message when I posted my own critical thoughts on this recently. But that’s not what my post today is about. The comments beneath the post by Ann Owen on Transition Network were snarled up with claim and counter-claim occasioned by the input of this website’s favourite eco-panglossian, that evangelist for the cult of irrationalist faith-based scientism, none other than Graham Strouts himself, spreading discord through another blog site like some dystopian Johnny Appleseed. The poor saps on Transition Network have learned the hard way that there’s …
Continue reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS