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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on April 14, 2013 | 8 Comments
A friend of mine mentioned that this blog is increasingly focusing on the big political picture and getting a bit too distant from the practicalities of small-scale growing. Maybe he’s right. I’ll try to make amends in my next post by writing something about the early progress of my vegetable growing experiment. But dammit, I just can’t help dwelling on the political side of things when it’s this that’s the main impediment to a just and sustainable food system – and given the upcoming political event on Wednesday, I feel obliged to post something political today. No, no – not …
Continue readingPosted on April 8, 2013 | 1 Comment
Excellent news just in from mid-Devon – the planning inspector has allowed the appeal of the Ecological Land Co-op for all three of their smallholdings at Greenham Reach on which I posted in January with no unexpected conditions attached. My delight at this outcome is mingled with anger that Mid Devon District Council spent an alleged £40,000 that they could presumably have devoted to something of actual use to their residents on contesting an application that their own planning officers had recommended for approval, while the dedicated people at the Ecological Land Co-op have had to devote a huge quantity of time, …
Continue readingPosted on April 2, 2013 | 2 Comments
DEFRA are conducting an industry-sponsored consultation on why there is a lack of new entrants into farming, and what can be done about it. I hate to be cynical (no, really I do), but here’s a few wild top of the head punts on my part as to the lack of new entrants: agricultural land costs way more than anyone can ever make back by farming it, old farm buildings have been converted into residences for people who don’t farm, the planning system prevents people who do farm from building new residences, many farmers get paid less than the costs …
Continue readingPosted on March 24, 2013 | 7 Comments
Last week I sold on a few organically-certified bags of reclaimed peat seed compost that I’d bought from West Riding Organics and received some negative feedback about the use of peat from customers who apparently hadn’t realised that the reclaimed peat I was selling was based on, er, peat. The episode raises some wider issues that are close to the theme of this blog, and has prompted me to think a bit more about them, so I thought I’d give them an airing. The basic problem is that peat is pretty much the best substrate for seed compost, but you can …
Continue readingPosted on March 18, 2013 | No Comments
Here’s a few brief thoughts on farming and technological progress, prompted to some degree by my recent blog wars on GM crops but not really about GM crops as such. The original context was Mark Lynas’s notorious speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, which I really don’t want to dwell on too much more (for now anyway…) except to mention his comment that the Amish in Pennsylvania “froze their technology with the horse and cart in 1850”. Now, I know very little about the Amish, other than thrilling to the will-they-won’t-they romance of Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis in Witness …
Continue readingPosted on March 10, 2013 | No Comments
Exciting news: I’m now tweeting my blogs. If someone had told me last March that I’d tweet my blogs in a year’s time, I wouldn’t have believed them, and the March before that I’d have contacted my doctor to ask if he could offer prophylaxis. Such is progress – which brings me to the topic of farming, technology and progress. But hold your horses, that’s for next week (oh all right, here’s a taster). Anyway, I’ll tweet you about it. My id, for the twitterati amongst you, is @csmaje since unfortunately @smallfarmfuture is already taken by some Welsh smallholders, and all …
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