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 28, 2024 | 38 Comments
The gist of my last two posts is that manufactured microbial food isn’t plausible on energetic grounds as a mass food approach unless there’s a rapid and large expansion of available global energy, and that the more likely future trend is in the opposite direction – towards less energy. Like it or not, I think that means a future of low-energy agrarian localism. The main reason I try to prepare the ground for agrarian localism in my writing is therefore because I don’t think we have much choice. I fear that the transition to agrarian localism might be troubled and …
Continue readingPosted on February 11, 2024 | 184 Comments
When people look back nowadays to medieval philosophy, they often dismiss it with the derisive remark that it was concerned with debating “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”. The sense is of an era whose thinkers engaged in sterile intellectual gymnastics founded on flawed premises. It’s an unfair characterization, which reveals more about the modern people who say it than the medieval objects of their contempt. Still, sometimes I wonder if there are aspects of our contemporary intellectual chitchat that might invoke angels-on-a-pin type dismissals from people in the future. One candidate could be the …
Continue readingPosted on January 22, 2024 | 128 Comments
Michael Daw has written a blog post that criticises my arguments concerning the energetic implausibility of manufactured food (or ‘precision fermentation’ to use the biotech industry’s preferred term). I don’t think his arguments stack up, as I’ll explain below, but this seems like a good opportunity to run through the relevant issues, which is the aim of this post. It will be followed by a few more posts on various issues relating to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and some of the criticisms of it, before I turn to other issues. One thing I must do at …
Continue readingPosted on January 1, 2024 | 99 Comments
A brief post today to wish Small Farm Future readers a happy new year and to give a preview of plans for this blog in 2024. In the coming week, I’ll be at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, joining a panel with Lord Deben, chair of the Climate Change Committee, Kyle Lischak of Client Earth and the inimitable Rosie Boycott to discuss the role of agroecological farming in the transition to net zero. So … should you accept this assignment, you have roughly one day to get back to me with your suggestions for what I should say. If you’re at …
Continue readingPosted on December 9, 2023 | 81 Comments
In a couple of weeks, my wife and maybe me will be packing and delivering the last veg boxes ever to issue from Vallis Veg, the business partnership she and I established in 2008, and we will be closing the business down. It won’t, I hope, be the last time any produce is grown or sold on our site, as I’ll explain below. Indeed, we’re excited about the new projects on the site that running the market garden has held us back from developing. But it will be the last time we sell produce under present business arrangements. Ironically, the …
Continue readingPosted on November 16, 2023 | 153 Comments
A few brief announcements before I launch into a hopefully relevant one-post digression from my present theme of exploring my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. First, Christmas has come early to readers of this blog, with my publishers offering a 25% discount until 1 January on my two books. Frankly, I’d be disappointed if anyone reading this doesn’t already have them prominently displayed on their shelves. But I’ll never know the truth of it, so for the laggards among you, just click here or here and use the code SayingNo25 to claim your reward. This offer, incidentally, applies …
Continue readingPosted on November 5, 2023 | 114 Comments
It’s time to turn my attention to a blog cycle concerning my recent book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, which I imagine will probably occupy somewhere between ten and twenty posts working sequentially through the book, no doubt with some digressions in between. Incidentally, the book has recently been long listed for the Non-Obvious Book Awards – a pleasure and an honour that I didn’t see coming. Obviously. I’ll get started on the blog cycle in a moment. Meanwhile, just to report that my (mostly indirect) war of words with George Monbiot continues online, with George still enthusiastically trailing …
Continue readingPosted on October 25, 2023 | 136 Comments
The last couple of weeks have brought some of the activity here at Small Farm Future Central to wider audiences – perhaps most obviously through George Monbiot’s response to my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future. I also joined Nate Hagens on his Reality Roundtable podcast to discuss food and community futures along with Pella Thiel and Dougald Hine, and Alison Kay on her Ancestral Kitchen podcast. Then there’s this interesting review of my book, in which I emerge relatively unscathed despite unpromising beginnings as “another joker on the left”. But here I’m going to focus mainly on some learnings from …
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