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 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 …
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 …
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