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 June 17, 2013 | 1 Comment
Apologies, but I haven’t had much of a chance to write an informative and considered blog post this week (nothing new there then…) My crime-busting alter ego Spudman has been hard at work writing a Hearing Statement for our upcoming planning appeal, which is now available for you to read – as fine a cure for insomnia as you’ll ever encounter. Boring work, yes, but necessary – and on the upside if you have any questions about the minutiae of the Somerset and Exmoor Joint Structure Plan, then Spudman is your man. I’m looking forward to reading the council’s own statement …
Continue readingPosted on June 9, 2013 | 4 Comments
With the growing season now at its height, what better time to reflect on that hardy perennial close to every gardener’s thoughts – weeds? As Shakespeare nearly wrote, ‘what’s in a name – a weed by any other name would still reduce your yields’. So here’s four definitions for the botanically unloved. The first hails from way back in the dark ages before anyone had invented permaculture and agroecology. In this view, weeds are much like their animal counterparts, vermin. They’re just born bad, like serial killers or planning officers, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Rehabilitation is …
Continue readingPosted on June 2, 2013 | No Comments
My latest article for the Wiley-Blackwell Statistics Views website is ‘Can organic farming feed the world?’, so my plan for this present post was merely to put up the link to that article. However, as I argue in said article, part of the reason why it makes any kind of sense to ask that question in the first place is the ideological context within which debates about farming futures occur, and plenty of other things have reminded me of that recently. One of them was a brief discussion on Ford Denison’s ever-informative Darwinian Agriculture blog. Another is the proliferation of …
Continue readingPosted on May 19, 2013 | 2 Comments
Regular readers of this blog will know that Spudman, my superhero alter ego, has been fighting a battle with Mendip District Council for the right to live on my land like a proper farmer (a planning officer at Mendip once told me that I wasn’t a ‘proper farmer’ – it’s now my badge of honour). Our farming activities have been on a bit of hiatus since last autumn, largely as a result of the planning situation, and I’ve seriously contemplated trying to find a less stressful and more remunerative line of work. But once an improper farmer always an improper farmer …
Continue readingPosted on May 12, 2013 | 6 Comments
I wrote some blog posts[1] a while back about GM crops that were prompted by Mark Lynas’s notorious speech to the Oxford Farming Conference[2]. This has led me into various blogosphere debates with GM proponents like Steve Savage[3], Rachael Ludwick[4] and Graham Strouts[5] – mostly polite, but not always. I suppose the main point of blogging is to put out ideas and try to use what comes back to you to reflect more deeply on the issue, so this essay is an attempt on my part to do that. It’s an awful lot longer than a regular blog post, and …
Continue readingPosted on May 5, 2013 | 9 Comments
If you’ve got nothing more than a 3x3m patch of urban garden, here’s a suggestion – dig it up and grow potatoes, carrots and onions. Why? Let me explain… The idea was prompted by River Cottage chef Mark Diacono’s book A Taste of the Unexpected. Diacono argues that life’s too short to grow unremarkable food like the three aforementioned vegetables, which are cheaply available from the shops anyway and taste no better when grown at home. Why not, he says, grow unusual things that are hard to find in the shops, no harder to grow, and utterly delicious? I appreciate …
Continue readingPosted on April 27, 2013 | 2 Comments
I recently finished Gordon Conway’s book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World? and offer below a few thoughts, since the book raises many issues close to the theme of this blog. Conway is an agricultural ecologist who’s been heavily involved in agricultural development work throughout his long career and has held all sorts of senior positions at places like the Rockefeller Foundation – so he’s well qualified to write on the subject, but also has a few blindspots. Unlike me in both respects, then. Conway’s basic story is that more people go hungry today than ever (although slightly …
Continue readingPosted on April 21, 2013 | 7 Comments
I thought I’d post an update on my vegetable growing experiment, if only to prove I do occasionally get out and do some growing rather than just sitting at my computer composing angry screeds about the state of the world. It’s way too early to present any results from the experiment, which will be some years in the coming if indeed they ever do. But I’m aiming to offer a running commentary as time goes on about how it’s going. I’d welcome any thoughts on what I’m doing, and what I might do better. So I’ve now pretty much got …
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