Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
Menu
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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on October 8, 2012 | 2 Comments
I posted a while back about the questions of tillage and fertility, and have since had an interesting debate about it with Patrick Whitefield, one of my favourite writers on matters agricultural and sustainable. Patrick pointed out that I failed to mention in my post a major drawback of tillage – the oxidation of humus, the loss of which greatly diminishes soil fertility and contributes to climate change through the associated carbon dioxide. He also suggested that tillage gardeners probably import just as much fertility as no till gardeners, and that in any case gardens are high fertility places, so …
Continue readingPosted on September 25, 2012 | 12 Comments
A lot of eco-thinking is based on the idea that there is a ‘balance of nature’. If only humanity could figure out how to play its part in that balance instead of jumping wildly on the far end of the scales, the argument goes, then we could assure our own future and that of our fellow organisms. But is there really such a thing as a ‘balance of nature’? And if there isn’t, does that mean that anything goes as far as we humans are concerned, that we should consider ourselves a ‘God species’, to use Mark Lynas’s phrase, and …
Continue readingPosted on September 6, 2012 | 10 Comments
There’s more to be said about the ecological side of gardens, forest gardens and Clifford Geertz as per my previous post, but I’ll leave that for another time. Here I want to pick up on some of the economic implications of Geertz’s analysis, again on the basis that what he has to say about the Indonesian past may prove strangely relevant to the UK future. Geertz’s concept of ‘agricultural involution’ refers to the situation in colonial Indonesia where the marginal labour productivity of sawah (see previous post if that phrase makes no sense) enabled a growing peasant population to take care …
Continue readingPosted on August 22, 2012 | 10 Comments
It seems likely that in the coming years climate change will make parts of the world increasingly uninhabitable and their lands increasingly uncultivable, leading to population movements towards the remaining cultivable areas. At the same time, energy prices will probably continue to rise, resulting in a situation where more people have to be fed from less land using fewer inputs. What would farming look like in that situation, and what kind of societies would result from it? An army of technocrats and associated cheerleaders are hoping to engineer their way out of this troubling situation. Who knows, maybe they’ll succeed …
Continue readingPosted on July 31, 2012 | No Comments
Here’s three random facts that I’ll try to weave into a worthwhile post. First, it’s proving to be one of the worst growing seasons in the UK that anyone can remember. Second, UK dairy farmers have been planning to strike in order to secure a fairer share of the retail value for their products. And third, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter – whose classic book The Collapse of Complex Societies I’m currently reading – argues that complex societies often arise as ‘energy averaging systems’ which are able to offset agricultural failure in one area by drawing in resources from elsewhere. I’ll …
Continue readingPosted on July 17, 2012 | 8 Comments
One of the first books I read when I became interested in sustainable farming was Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic One Straw Revolution. His four principles of natural or ‘do nothing’ farming – no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding, no chemicals – seemed powerful and persuasive, and his results – superior yields, superior income, less work – seemed to speak for themselves. Throw in a humble, life-affirming, Buddhist-inflected nature philosophy and it all amounted to a pretty attractive package for an impressionable would-be farmer. With five years of commercial growing now under my belt I’ve just re-read the book. I wouldn’t say …
Continue reading
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS