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 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 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 …
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