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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on March 22, 2012 | 14 Comments
I was talking about woodland and grassland in my last but one post before I so rudely interrupted myself to have a rant about supermarkets and farm closures. So let’s get back to the subject of grassland. Since most of us have had little more experience of grass than as somewhere to play in our parents’ gardens it’s not surprising that we often struggle to think of it as a crop. But grass can be extraordinarily productive (worth thinking about before you go and exercise your dog in some poor soul’s silage field), with the additional benefit of providing a …
Continue readingPosted on March 8, 2012 | 5 Comments
Yesterday I went to an equipment sale of an organic grower who’s closing down. I picked up one or two bargains, which was nice – but not nice enough to compensate for the sadness I felt. It wasn’t just the uncomfortable feeling that at the next sale I attend it might very well be me doing the selling, but also the feeling that each of these occasions is one more small example of how badly wrong we’re getting our food system. If you believe certain ideologues then yesterday’s event was a necessary evil – the tough love of the free …
Continue readingPosted on February 23, 2012 | 10 Comments
I mentioned in my last post the coppice woodland at Vallis Veg – now officially ‘non-coppice woodland’ courtesy of the Rural Payments Agency, as I explained. That seems to lead naturally into a discussion of woodland at our site – or more specifically into the vexed question of the relationship between woodland, grassland and cropland – which I shall probably have to explore in more detail over time. To start with, let me outline the different land usages on our site. When we bought the land (around 18 acres altogether) it was 100% permanent pasture. We now have about 2 …
Continue readingPosted on February 12, 2012 | 3 Comments
I don’t suppose I have much in common with the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s fourth richest man, but I discovered recently that we share an income source. Both of us get EU handouts courtesy of the Common Agricultural Policy. I think the duke must have the system better sussed than me judging by our pay cheques: a cool £820,000 for the duke, and a not very cool £700.15 for me. I derived the former figure from an interesting article by George Monbiot, in which he named and shamed some of the major beneficiaries of the CAP – who also happen …
Continue readingPosted on February 3, 2012 | 1 Comment
One of the reasons I started this blog was that I thought it would be good to have recipes and information for customers available online in an easily archived format. But whenever I sit in front of a nice big blank computer screen the urge to write about the politics of food and farming is overwhelming – hence the underwhelming number of recipes and vegetable posts to date. Actually, the question of vegetable recipes is quite political too. More than a few ex-customers and potential customers have told us that they’d like to get a box from us, but they …
Continue readingPosted on January 26, 2012 | 4 Comments
I spent last Wednesday travelling to East Yorkshire and back to collect our brand new delivery van, the old one having spectacularly failed its latest MOT. Well, it’s brand new for us anyway (at 7 years old it’s precisely 22 years younger than the average age of the Vallis Veg vehicle fleet to date). So this post naturally has to be about transport and fuel, a lengthy drive across the heart of England giving me the perfect opportunity to think about these things. What struck me most as I drove was the depressing ugliness of our country’s transport infrastructure – …
Continue readingPosted on January 16, 2012 | No Comments
As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the excellent Oxford Real Farming Conference a couple of weeks ago. I gave a short talk at it on farm scale polyculture, and I promised I’d post something here about what ‘polyculture’ is all about. In a nutshell, the idea is that instead of growing single outputs or ‘monocultures’ (a field of genetically uniform wheat, for example), it often makes more sense to grow multiple outputs or ‘polycultures’. In my talk, I tried to address some of the many different dimensions of polyculture and illustrate how we’ve tried to implement them at Vallis …
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