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 December 17, 2012 | 1 Comment
I keep coming across the notion currently that ‘ideological’ support for small-scale farming is problematic and that no particular level of farm scale can be regarded as optimal – ideas which are obviously at the heart of this blog. I’m inclined to respond with the thought that there is no such thing as an ‘unideological’ position – it’s a cardinal error to assume that the mainstream way of doing things must somehow involve less political baggage. And if indeed it’s true that no particular level of farm scale is optimal, then surely the time has come for a massive investment …
Continue readingPosted on December 9, 2012 | No Comments
I just spent a couple of amazing days at the University of Oxford at a workshop on agrobiodiversity. For me it felt like a true “university” with anthropologists, ecologists, geneticists, archaeobotanists and farmers coming together to share their skills and knowledge. I learned so much in such a short space of time that I feel a bit overwhelmed. It’ll take me a while to digest it all, if I ever do. Many of the themes that I’ve previously raised on this blog loomed large – farm scale, labour inputs, perennial versus annual crops, biodiversity. I don’t think many of my …
Continue readingPosted on December 2, 2012 | No Comments
As Small Farm Future starts going viral, I’m finding that it’s subject to an increasing amount of spam. I’ve recently activated spam filtering software to deal with the problem, but there’s a risk that some genuine comments will get filtered out. If you find that your comments don’t appear on the blog please email me via Vallis Veg to let me know. I’m currently in the midst of a raft of interesting meetings around the country – the inauguration of a UK branch of the international peasant/small farmer movement Via Campesina, working on the emerging College of Enlightened Agriculture, and …
Continue readingPosted on November 23, 2012 | 6 Comments
Here’s a couple of thoughts on E.O.Wilson’s book The Diversity of Life, which I’ve just finished reading – another in the long list of excellent tomes that I should have read years ago. Wilson – Harvard biologist and founder of the term ‘biodiversity’ – doesn’t have all that much to say about farming in his book except that it tends to encroach on wilderness. It’s this habitat destruction that’s the No.1 cause of contemporary species extinctions, which are proceeding at such a high rate that it seems we’re now entering the sixth major extinction spasm in geological history, the last …
Continue readingPosted on November 15, 2012 | 8 Comments
I posted a couple of weeks ago about the high tech farming of the future. Little did I know that the planning officers at Mendip District Council already have their own distinctive vision of high tech farming, which they’re ready to roll out right now. In refusing our planning application for agricultural residence the officers stated that theft and vandalism on the site are better deterred by “increased site security from gates, floodlights, alarms etc”, that crop protection can be taken care of “by an alarm system triggered by a thermometer, allowing workers to respond according to conditions” that predator …
Continue readingPosted on November 12, 2012 | 2 Comments
Here at Small Farm Future we cherish our independence fiercely so we’re not in the habit of taking money to promote special interests (though anyone reading this in possession of a fortune and in want of a good cause should certainly feel free to contact me). Nor, for the same reason, do we usually promote external events or products. However, on this occasion I’ve decided to offer a puff for Independence Day, which is being held here in Frome, Somerset on 17 November. The event is a “day of debate, conversation and information-sharing” on the theme of “supermarkets, big retail …
Continue readingPosted on November 5, 2012 | No Comments
An article in last week’s New Scientist makes interesting reading for those of us in the agroecology movement (James Mitchell Crow, ‘Down on the robofarm’ NS 2888, pp42-5). The problem is how in the future can we grow more crops for more people in a more sustainable and more labour-friendly way, and the answer is…use robots. In fact, we’re already quite a way down this route with so-called ‘precision farming’, which is no doubt a great improvement on the ‘imprecision farming’ that preceded it, but I suspect that anyone with an agroecological bent reading the article would be struck by the …
Continue readingPosted on October 24, 2012 | 2 Comments
It’s a curious fact that despite everything they’ve endured throughout modern history, small-scale farmers still constitute nearly half the world’s population, and grow around 70% of its food, and yet most currents of mainstream policy analysis seem implacably opposed to their survival. Marxists think they ought to be urban proletarians, liberals and neo-greens think they ought to be urban entrepreneurs, while development agronomists think they ought to make way for a large-scale commercial agriculture which is supposedly better adapted to the environmental realities of the present world. The latter, at any rate, is the message from a recent blog on …
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