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 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 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 …
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