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 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 …
Continue readingPosted on October 3, 2023 | 212 Comments
In my previous post I tried to show how George Monbiot’s book Regenesis employs a mythic narrative structure that recuperates the positive capacities of modern urban-industrial civilization to overcome the problems it’s created without fundamental social change. I think his book succeeds pretty well in offering this mythic redemption. But I doubt what it’s proposing will work out in practice. In that previous post I also mentioned a critical if exemplarily polite review of my own book, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future by Jeremy Williams. Now, I know it’s not really the done thing for an author to critique their reviews, …
Continue readingPosted on September 23, 2023 | 126 Comments
It’s been nearly three months since Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future was published, with its critique of George Monbiot’s book Regenesis and its alternative arguments for agrarian localism. The responses that have come my way so far have run the gamut from ‘brilliant’ to ‘nauseatingly silly’, while happily erring more towards the former. Meanwhile, as I feared, proponents of the bacterial foods advocated by Monbiot have been busy trying to mobilise public investment in it (see, for example, here and here). This is a surefire way of veiling the basic energetic implausibility of the approach for as long as …
Continue readingPosted on September 13, 2023 | 94 Comments
It’s time to turn my attention to a blog cycle fully focused around my recent book Saying NO to a Farm Free Future, after dallying with various preambles and tangents in recent posts. I don’t plan to turn it into quite the marathon that the cycle around my previous book became, but a few posts to fill out some of the material in Saying NO seems worthwhile. But let’s start slow, with nothing more than a few thoughts on the epigraph on page ix of the book, some words I chose from Mikhail Bakhtin: The people do not exclude themselves …
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