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 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 readingPosted on February 3, 2014 | 5 Comments
Christmas is over, I know, but this week Small Farm Future brings you a veritable Santa’s sack-full of snippets from the alternative farming scene. First up, the latest issue of the brilliant The Land magazine is hot off the press – including an article by one Chris Smaje entitled ‘Peasants, Food Sovereignty and the Landworkers’ Alliance’, which defends contemporary peasant agricultures and the concept of food sovereignty from the derision of Marxists, free marketeers and eco-panglossians. Sounds like my sort of chap. And many of the other articles are almost as good, including a penetrating analysis by Simon Fairlie of the …
Continue readingPosted on January 26, 2014 | 99 Comments
I wrote a version of this post quite a while ago, and have been sitting on it ever since. Various criticisms of permaculture and permaculturists had been accumulating in my thoughts, but I don’t take parricide lightly (permaculture is, after all, how I got into all of this). Then the ever-excellent Land Magazine ran some critical articles about permaculture, followed by some predictable onslaughts from the eco-panglossian brigade, and I started to feel protective. But anyway, here for what it’s worth is my post on the good, the bad and the ugly of permaculture. At Vallis Veg we’re fortunate to …
Continue readingPosted on January 19, 2014 | 4 Comments
I’ve waded into a couple of debates on organic farming and nitrogen on other blog sites recently, as well as on my own – namely Ford Denison’s Darwinian Agriculture site, and Biology Fortified, which seems to be another one of these ‘eco-pragmatist’ type websites that likes to pit ‘science’ against alternative agriculture. That’s surely a topic for another post, but for now I’ll stick to nitrogen. The basic point of Andy McGuire’s article on Biology Fortified was that organic farmers in the US routinely use manure from non-organic farms, and so are free-riding on the synthetic nitrogen used in conventional …
Continue readingPosted on January 1, 2014 | 8 Comments
Happy new year of the family farm (…any bets on how many more of them will be gone by year’s end?) Over the next couple of weeks I’ll mostly be sat in the cab of a digger trying to carve a new family farm out of the wilderness here in northeast Somerset – so please excuse any delays in your regular blog service. Anyway, here’s a quick post to chew on. A few years ago I published a paper called ‘Genesis and J. Baird Callicott: the land ethic revisited’ in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture1. …
Continue readingPosted on December 13, 2013 | 4 Comments
Hankering after a seasonal story, but tired of the saccharine nonsense doled out by the mainstream media at this time of year? Look no further, for Small Farm Future’s very own Chris Smaje has brought you ‘Global Hunger: Three Christmas Ghost Stories’ – now available for free on Wiley-Blackwell’s Statistics Views website. It beats the Muppet Christmas Carol any day! The article is something of a meditation on the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, which was prompted by my recent debates around this with Clem and Tom here on this blog, and also to some extent with Graham Strouts on his …
Continue readingPosted on December 5, 2013 | No Comments
Maybe it’s time to write something about practical farm issues for a change, and what could be more practical than compost? In principle, compost is one of those ‘what’s not to like’ phenomena. You pile up unwanted organic matter that otherwise requires disposal, mix it with a bit of air and water and, hey presto, you end up with a magical substance that feeds your next crop and builds your soil. Compost is foundational to the organic farming idea of building beneficial biological cycles into farming practice. But the practicalities of composting raise quite a number of dilemmas. Here are …
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