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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on January 27, 2013 | 8 Comments
The average age of market gardeners in the UK is around 60, and currently we import around 70% of the fruit and 40% of the veg that could be grown here. We badly need more people growing more fruit and veg – not just my view, but also that of the Fruit and Vegetables Taskforce commissioned by the previous government. Market gardening – and especially any kind of organic or agroecological market gardening – is much more labour intensive than extensive farming, and it doesn’t pay too well. Throw in the fact that many farmhouses have been sold off as …
Continue readingPosted on January 21, 2013 | 2 Comments
In its ceaseless search through the blogosphere to identify even the smallest of byte-sized morsels that might inform its mission, Small Farm Future has stumbled upon an alter ego in the shape of Steve Savage’s blog Applied Mythology, which puts the case for agribusiness-as-usual. I think I can safely say that the editorial office here at Small Farm Future is unanimous in its commitment to evidence-based policymaking, and Savage’s evidence as an industry insider is certainly interesting. I do wonder a little why critics of organic farming and similar initiatives are so vociferous in their condemnations given the overwhelming dominance …
Continue readingPosted on January 14, 2013 | 7 Comments
I’m planning to start running what I hope will be a long-term experiment in different methods of organic vegetable growing, and I’d like to invite comments on it. If you can suggest ways in which the experiment could be improved, please let me know now before I embark upon it! I’ve written a brief outline of the experiment under the grand title of the ‘Vallis Veg Small Scale Horticultural Trial’ which is also available on the Research and publications page, so I won’t repeat the details here. The basic point is that in an ideal world it would be nice if …
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