Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on November 29, 2021 | 62 Comments
In this post and the next, I aim to lay out some issues about property relations by sketching how they might work in a semi-autarkic rural community or region within a small farm future. My focus is a temperate lowland zone like my home in southwest England, although the general issues apply more widely. Maybe we’re in the territory of the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex once again. What I’m going to sketch is so different from how things presently work in my home patch that no doubt it can easily be dismissed as the kind of idle fancy best left …
Continue readingPosted on February 8, 2018 | 54 Comments
My title comes from a 19th century English song, which includes this verse… If all the land in England was divided up quite fair / There would be work for everyone to earn an honest share / Well some have thousand acre farms which they have got somehow / But I’ll be satisfied to get three acres and a cow …but more immediately, it comes from a great evening of folksong and storytelling I heard recently in which Robin Grey and Katherine Hallewell told – well, not quite the history of the world in 10½ blog posts so much as the history of …
Continue readingPosted on September 4, 2017 | 36 Comments
So it’s time for the first of my 10½ blog posts detailing the history of the world – essential (?) background reading for my forthcoming effort to lay out the basis for a plausible-ish and sustainable future peasant republic. Just one further preliminary note on references – I’ve found it too much of a faff trying to mirror the footnotes and references in the full text into each successive blog post, so I’ve just stripped out all the references from the blog posts. You can find a fully referenced version of the entire essay here. oOo The land that I …
Continue readingPosted on April 18, 2017 | 63 Comments
OK, so I said in my last post that I was done with crunching the numbers for my imaginary future republics of Wessex and Londinium. I lied to you. The discussion with Joe Clarkson under that post has prompted me to look at one last scenario. Suppose we followed his idea for a nationwide ‘transitional agrarian repopulation effort’, how might that look? So I took all the agricultural land in the UK (excepting rough grazing) and modelled an organic peasant-style allotment agriculture with conservative yield assumptions and low meat/dairy production in order to see what kind of population could be …
Continue readingPosted on April 8, 2017 | 22 Comments
I promised a bonfire of the numbers on my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex project in this post. Well, here goes. We shall also be taking a couple of side trips to the city state of Londinium – which, it turns out, is not without its peasant-like aspects – and to the Principality of Wales. So pour yourself a stiff one, pull up a pew, and get yourself some matches to help me light the flame. First, though, a stop press from the Somerset County Council newsroom. What, you didn’t know Somerset County Council had a newsroom? Shame on you – …
Continue readingPosted on March 17, 2017 | 93 Comments
I think it’s about time I paid my next visit to the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex. But first, news of another publication from the Small Farm Future stable – a piece entitled ‘Why Britain should protect and cherish its small farms’ published by the insurance arm of everybody’s favourite farming union, the NFU. When asked why the tone of the article was more moderate than that usually to be found here on this website, Small Farm Future CEO Chris Smaje replied, “Because NFU Mutual pay better than the punters on this blog. Though, since you mention it, the donate button …
Continue readingPosted on December 12, 2016 | 42 Comments
The last time we were in Wessex, I showed that its denizens circa 2039 could probably feed themselves quite comfortably using organic farming methods with 20% of the population concentrating largely on neo-peasant subsistence farming using 40% of existing lowland farmland, and the remaining 80% of the population fed by larger-scale, more cereal staple oriented farming from the remaining 60% of the farmland, plus a bit of upland grazing. However, as it stands that scenario does depend on a fossil energy-intensive ‘business as usual’ approach on the large-scale farms. It seems worth pondering an alternative, zero fossil energy scenario. Here …
Continue readingPosted on November 23, 2016 | 27 Comments
Let us beat a retreat from the troubling politics of the real world and pay another visit to the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex, where all is sweet accord. Though in the light of recent events in the UK and the US, it’s tempting to begin with a little story that just might conceivably link the ghost of Wessex present with the ghost of Wessex future. It goes something like this: With hindsight, Britain’s exit from the EU turned out to herald its final decline as a major global economic force. Though it had a freer hand to make its own …
Continue readingPosted on November 7, 2016 | 27 Comments
There can only be one topic for a blog post today, as a great country stands poised to make a momentous decision with potentially global repercussions for decades to come. I refer, of course, to the Peasants’ Republic of Wessex, and the issue of how it will feed the 80% of its population who are not active farmers. For indeed it is high time that we returned to that happy nation and, even if the rest of the world should lose its head, tarry amongst its denizens to ruminate upon the intertwined fates of the human tribe in all its …
Continue readingPosted on September 9, 2016 | 9 Comments
In my last post I presented a picture of the production on an ‘average’ 10 hectare holding in the future Peasant’s Republic of Wessex. Here I’m going to update that picture slightly in the light of some of the comments I received and then take a look at what sort of diet such a holding would turn out for its inhabitants. So first the feedback. One general comment I received is that farming is specific: specific to the local soil, the farm’s exact microclimate, and so on – so two different farms are likely to be as similar as ‘chalk …
Continue readingPosted on August 30, 2016 | 39 Comments
Right, no more faffing around. Without further ado, I’m going to describe the layout of an ‘average’ 10 hectare holding in the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex, circa 2039, as introduced in various preceding posts. The holding, remember, has 10 whole-time equivalent workers, and ten dependents (children/elders). I’m going to play around with those figures in due course, but let’s stick with them for now – so imagine 10 people doing the work implied in what I outline below. As to what energy sources they’ll have available…well, I’ll come to that when I’m ready. Please shout out if you don’t like …
Continue readingPosted on August 23, 2016 | 26 Comments
I’ve had a certain amount of negative feedback on my current little exercise in describing a neo-peasant future, not so much here at Small Farm Future but in its wider tracks across cyberspace. Part of the problem seems to be its futurological aspects. Some people are quite certain that the future will be a techno-cornucopian one, with no place for the idea that there’ll be any need, let alone desire, for widespread localised, labour-intensive, land-based husbandry. Others are equally certain that, conversely, runaway climate change, energy scarcity and political collapse will so undermine our civilizational moorings that attempts like mine …
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