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 September 24, 2013 | 4 Comments
Throughout most of its existence, I’ve been the main grower for our market garden but this year my wife Cordelia has been in the forefront while I’ve sat at my computer preparing endless submissions for our planning appeal and writing elegant rebuttals to all those other angry men at large in the blogosphere who are too benighted to see the truth of my words. But now our planning appeal is over I’m getting back into the growing, helping Cordelia to put this year’s season to bed, and planning for next year. All of which has set me to thinking about the …
Continue readingPosted on September 17, 2013 | 5 Comments
I recently discovered that the government’s Department for Communities and Local Government has, in its wisdom, published a consultation document entitled Greater Flexibilities For Change Of Use. Contained therein is the suggestion that farmers with redundant agricultural buildings could convert these to residential dwellings under permitted development rights without the need to get planning permission. My first thought was that sustainable small-scale agriculture is a labour intensive enterprise that really needs people in numbers living on the farm, but currently this is pretty much ruled out by planning policy, so how good it could be to create multiple farm residences …
Continue readingPosted on September 12, 2013 | 5 Comments
Well, it’s been a funny week and indeed a funny year for the Small Farm Future publishing empire. Having scaled back my farming activities this year in order to fight our planning application, I’ve also had more time to do a bit of writing around alternative and small scale farming systems. Encapsulated therein is the main contradiction of my life, which I fear I’ll never resolve: as a grower and small-scale farmer, I love producing useful stuff for people to eat, working outdoors and figuring out as best I can good practical ways of trying to farm – against which …
Continue readingPosted on September 4, 2013 | 6 Comments
September greetings to you all, as Small Farm Future returns from its summer recess and gets ready to unveil its autumn programme of blogs to an expectant world. But first a breaking news flash – we’ve just heard that we’ve won our appeal for a temporary residence to support our small-scale farming business. More on that soon. Spudman, my planning appeal fighting superhero alter ego who regular readers will know well from this blog, has now retired to tend his potato patch, exhausted but content. However, he’s enlisted one of his pals to take up the cudgels from now on. …
Continue readingPosted on August 21, 2013 | No Comments
Yesterday we had our planning appeal hearing, much anticipated on this blog by my fearless superhero alter ego Spudman. Actually, in the event Spudman didn’t prove to be all that fearless – I’d spent too long working on this and the outcome is too important for me not to feel nervous. Besides which, Spudman is much more at home weeding his potatoes than sitting shuffling papers in a windowless room wrestling with the accusations of irate objectors, however spurious their arguments. Fortunately, we had some wonderful supporters in attendance too who I hope succeeded in helping me show the planning …
Continue readingPosted on July 19, 2013 | 2 Comments
The time is nigh. On 20 August, our planning appeal will determine the fate of Vallis Veg. Like many a sage and seeker after wisdom before him, Spudman is readying himself for the ordeal to come by repairing for a week to a mountain fastness. There, he will fast, eat Kendal mintcake, contemplate the infinite, climb rocks and drive about a bit with the faithful Spudboy as his companion. Then he will return (if the mountain gods permit), memorise Mendip District Council’s draft Local Plan and all two hundred and seven paragraphs of the National Planning Policy Statement, and come …
Continue readingPosted on July 14, 2013 | No Comments
One potential argument against small-scale farming I’ve heard from various sources lately, including Ford Denison (though to be fair, being a thoughtful academic, he was as I recall only raising it as a possibility), an impassioned audience member at a talk I gave at Off Grid and – implicitly – a local objector to my planning application is that small farms may involve taking out potentially productive agricultural land for houses, barns and other infrastructure and so are relatively less efficient than larger farms. As always, there are all sorts of complexities involved in assessing such claims, and inevitably they touch upon wider issues …
Continue readingPosted on July 8, 2013 | No Comments
We’ve got a fair bit of grass on our holding which we haven’t been using to its full potential by grazing it – partly because it’s hard enough to find the time to grow vegetables, let alone looking after livestock, and partly because it’s hard to look after livestock when…(yes, I know I sound like a broken record) we don’t live on the site (more on our planning appeal soon…the date is now set for 20 August). But we want to make amends by getting some ruminants on the grass (grass grows so well here in Somerset that I sometimes think …
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