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 February 3, 2014 | 5 Comments
Christmas is over, I know, but this week Small Farm Future brings you a veritable Santa’s sack-full of snippets from the alternative farming scene. First up, the latest issue of the brilliant The Land magazine is hot off the press – including an article by one Chris Smaje entitled ‘Peasants, Food Sovereignty and the Landworkers’ Alliance’, which defends contemporary peasant agricultures and the concept of food sovereignty from the derision of Marxists, free marketeers and eco-panglossians. Sounds like my sort of chap. And many of the other articles are almost as good, including a penetrating analysis by Simon Fairlie of the …
Continue readingPosted on November 19, 2013 | 6 Comments
Thanks to a tipoff from Paul, my friend and much-missed some time contributor to this blog, I watched this interesting programme about global population trends by Professor Hans Rosling. Lovely graphics, great public speaker – bottom line(s): birth rates are falling in most parts of the world thanks to the heroic efforts of health and birth control specialists, but income inequalities remain stark…the poorest people use virtually none of the world’s resources (including carbon) so it’s really not a problem if they use more, small-scale farmers are heavily represented amongst the poorest of the poor, and simple things like access …
Continue readingPosted on April 27, 2013 | 2 Comments
I recently finished Gordon Conway’s book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World? and offer below a few thoughts, since the book raises many issues close to the theme of this blog. Conway is an agricultural ecologist who’s been heavily involved in agricultural development work throughout his long career and has held all sorts of senior positions at places like the Rockefeller Foundation – so he’s well qualified to write on the subject, but also has a few blindspots. Unlike me in both respects, then. Conway’s basic story is that more people go hungry today than ever (although slightly …
Continue readingPosted on February 17, 2013 | 6 Comments
I’ve reviewed R. Ford Denison’s book Darwinian Agriculture in the current issue of Permaculture Magazine (No.75) – the review is also available on this site’s publications page. I won’t go over the same ground here as in the review – I’ll just make a few observations that I didn’t have space for there. But it’s a cracking book – thoroughly recommended for anyone with an interest in food and farming. Given that Denison takes on both the biotechnology industry and those he terms ‘self-styled agroecologists’ such as myself, it’s remarkable that his book seems to have received such uniformly positive reviews. I …
Continue readingPosted on August 22, 2012 | 10 Comments
It seems likely that in the coming years climate change will make parts of the world increasingly uninhabitable and their lands increasingly uncultivable, leading to population movements towards the remaining cultivable areas. At the same time, energy prices will probably continue to rise, resulting in a situation where more people have to be fed from less land using fewer inputs. What would farming look like in that situation, and what kind of societies would result from it? An army of technocrats and associated cheerleaders are hoping to engineer their way out of this troubling situation. Who knows, maybe they’ll succeed …
Continue readingPosted on July 17, 2012 | 8 Comments
One of the first books I read when I became interested in sustainable farming was Masanobu Fukuoka’s classic One Straw Revolution. His four principles of natural or ‘do nothing’ farming – no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding, no chemicals – seemed powerful and persuasive, and his results – superior yields, superior income, less work – seemed to speak for themselves. Throw in a humble, life-affirming, Buddhist-inflected nature philosophy and it all amounted to a pretty attractive package for an impressionable would-be farmer. With five years of commercial growing now under my belt I’ve just re-read the book. I wouldn’t say …
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