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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on January 11, 2012 | 5 Comments
Last week I went to the Oxford Real Farming Conference. When I got back I discovered that our packing tent had blown away in the gales, which just goes to prove that you should never, ever leave your farm for any reason, least of all conferences and other such trifles. But leave the farm I did, so I thought I might as well make the most of it by reporting back on the conference – which actually was excellent in many ways, and well worth attending (packing tent excepted). My admiration extends as ever to Colin Tudge and Ruth West …
Continue readingPosted on January 1, 2012 | 3 Comments
Having recently put away several festive meals which varied in all respects save the ubiquitous roast potato, I thought the time was right to pen something about this stalwart vegetable. The potato always seems to play second fiddle to wheat. UK farmers devote 42% of cropped land to wheat, and only 3% to potatoes – even if, scandalously, around 47% of the wheat is fed to livestock (the stats are here). Potatoes also seem to come off second best in the alternative farming movement. William Cobbett, the founding father of English agricultural radicalism, wrote in Cottage Economy (1822) that the potato …
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