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 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 …
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 …
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