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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on June 30, 2013 | 4 Comments
Just when I thought my academic career was over, my first peer-reviewed academic article in five years comes out in the Journal of Consumer Culture, and I get to be a Visiting Researcher at the University of Surrey. The article in JCC is about the veg box scheme I jointly ran for 5 years, and the lessons it holds for green political thought (act local think global, as they say). It’s been published online but not yet in print, so I’ll blog some more about it when it exists on paper. Here I’m going to focus on some subsidiary themes …
Continue readingPosted on June 24, 2013 | 8 Comments
Like every successful serial, Small Farm Future left its audience on an exciting cliffhanger last week – would the next post involve a feature on my diesel bills or on an article in the Aberdeen and Northeast Scotland Family History Society Journal? Well, all is now revealed – I’m going with the diesel bills, so you’ll just have to restrain your impatience for the Scottish history… Last year I used 110 litres of diesel in my tractor, and a further 20 litres of petrol in hand operated machinery (rotovator, chainsaw etc) – the energy equivalent of about fifty 25kg sacks …
Continue readingPosted 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 …
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