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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on March 3, 2013 | 9 Comments
I promised a post this week on technology and the Amish but for various reasons I’m going to hold that over for a couple of weeks – mostly pressure of work, including attending the launch of a UK Via Campesina branch over the weekend, a very exciting development. More on that in another post soon. Still, I don’t want to disappoint my avid readers so I thought I’d tide you over with a few thoughts on glyphosate, culled from some links on Ford Denison’s excellent Darwinian Agriculture blog. First up is this interesting discussion about herbicides and organic farming. The problem: …
Continue readingPosted on February 24, 2013 | 6 Comments
I only posted a couple of weeks ago about GM crops and Mark Lynas, but a fortnight’s a long time in agriculture (and even longer in the blogosphere), so time for a few updates. Lynas, you may recall, is the political science graduate and some time environmental activist who’s now made his peace with corporate agribusiness, the nuclear industry etc and gave a rousing speech to the Oxford Farming Conference about the benefits of transgenic (GM) technology. One of his big themes was the need to embrace science in considering the case for GM crops. Another one was the misdeeds of …
Continue readingPosted on February 17, 2013 | 6 Comments
I’ve reviewed R. Ford Denison’s book Darwinian Agriculture in the current issue of Permaculture Magazine (No.75) – the review is also available on this site’s publications page. I won’t go over the same ground here as in the review – I’ll just make a few observations that I didn’t have space for there. But it’s a cracking book – thoroughly recommended for anyone with an interest in food and farming. Given that Denison takes on both the biotechnology industry and those he terms ‘self-styled agroecologists’ such as myself, it’s remarkable that his book seems to have received such uniformly positive reviews. I …
Continue readingPosted on February 10, 2013 | 15 Comments
Mark Lynas has garnered a lot of publicity recently in recanting his opposition to GM crops. He’s joined the growing bandwagon of renegade environmentalists – the so called ‘neo-environmentalists’, who include the likes of Patrick Moore, Steward Brand and James Lovelock – in adopting techno-fixer arguments about the necessity of high tech solutions to the world’s environmental problems. I’ve read the text of his recent GM speech, and listened to his further defence of his views on the BBC’s ‘Hard Talk’ programme, and I find his arguments unconvincing and spurious for five main reasons. Most of them turn on the point …
Continue readingPosted on February 3, 2013 | 5 Comments
Last summer, we woke up one morning on our market garden site (yes I know we’re not allowed to live there – just don’t tell the planners) to find a young roe deer buck lying on our track which had clearly died there overnight. Puzzled, we asked wildlife expert Simon King, who lives nearby, if he could figure out what had happened. He diagnosed a kill by another buck, showing us the wounds where the horns had penetrated the abdomen. Never ones to look a gift deer in the mouth, we then butchered the animal – its abdominal cavity was a …
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