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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 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 readingPosted on June 25, 2012 | 10 Comments
I posted a while back on the issue of annual and perennial plants and the permaculture movement. An interesting debate on the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia website initiated by Angelo Eliades has prompted me to reflect further on the question. Other than confirming once again that the Y chromosome finds ever new arenas in which to construct its fragile ego, the debate turns on the possibilities for replacing the widespread cultivation of annual plants in global agriculture and horticulture with perennial plants. As explained in my original post and as further outlined in Eliades’s article, the potential benefits of …
Continue readingPosted on June 21, 2012 | 6 Comments
I posted a while back about the relative merits of grassland and woodland for food production. Here’s a little addendum to that post. Suppose you can produce 170kg of beef from 1 hectare of grassland annually – quite a generous supposition, I think, if the cattle are being fed from the grass alone. That amounts to something like 1,960MJ of food energy. Suppose alternatively that you have two oak trees and two crab apples on your hectare of woodland, producing something like 160kg of acorns and 100kg of crab apples annually. In practice, you’d probably have more than that, or …
Continue readingPosted on June 3, 2012 | 8 Comments
Here in Frome we were lucky enough to have an excellent programme of evening discussions recently entitled Generation Next. A common theme of the evenings I attended was the need to come up with something to replace the dysfunctional and unsustainable systems of power, finance and knowledge that currently hold us in their grip. And this was a ‘common’ theme literally inasmuch as several speakers referenced the idea of ‘global commons’ as a way of transcending these current difficulties. The term has a nice ring to it. It’s surely right to emphasise that we’re common denizens of just the one …
Continue readingPosted on May 14, 2012 | 7 Comments
A couple of posts ago I mentioned the issue of tillage in the context of the permaculture movement. Here I want to discuss another issue at the core of permaculture that troubles me, namely its emphasis on perennial plants. A key permaculture theme is to observe the natural world and then apply its lessons in conscious human design. Looking at natural plant communities globally it’s striking that almost always they’re dominated by perennial plants, with only a few annuals. Human agriculture, on the other hand, is dominated by annual plants, with only a few perennials. Supposing we could model our …
Continue readingPosted on April 27, 2012 | 1 Comment
I extolled the virtues of potatoes in a recent post, and in this one I’m returning to the issue with a little more hard data (or hard-ish, at any rate) having just completed an analysis of the energy balance, labour inputs and costs of various scales and methods of potato production. The motive behind it was partly to research the possibility of establishing a local potato growing co-op in Frome where I live – if you’re local and potentially interested in this, please have a look at the full document Notes on Forming a Potato Co-op in Frome, (also posted on …
Continue readingPosted on April 9, 2012 | 28 Comments
Spring is in the air, the buds are bursting, the birds are at their nests, young lovers are canoodling in sunny parks, and – before I get too carried away – farmers are spraying s**t all over their fields. For indeed it is fertility in the latter sense that is my topic in the present post. I’ve talked about woodland and grassland in recent posts, so I feel that I should now complete the set by talking about cropland. With cropland, fertility is a key issue, and I’ll come to it in a moment. But first I want to say …
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