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The way that humans have messed with the Earth’s carbon cycle rightly figures as planetary eco-problem No.1 in public debate, but the way we’ve messed with its nitrogen cycle probably ought to get more attention than it does. In the former case, farming often gets a bit too much of the blame in my view, whereas in the latter case there’s no doubt that it’s the key culprit. The consequences for nature loss, human health and climate change are serious. If humans somehow manage to get over their fatal attraction to the fossil fuels that drive our messing with the carbon cycle while retaining anything like present patterns of energy use, then our messing with the nitrogen cycle will loom all the larger as a problem of high-energy human civilization. According to the planetary boundary framework, human use of nitrogen (and phosphorus) is already a long way past levels compatible with the stability and resilience of earth systems.

The inimitable Gunnar Rundgren has been writing an excellent series of articles about farming and the nitrogen cycle. I’m not going to cover much of the same ground, but I’d recommend taking a look at his analysis. Instead, I focus more on arguments about … well, arguments about arguments about nitrogen. And an argument about how we might get by with using less of it.

But let me get into that by outlining what seems to me a problematic modern mythology around nitrogen in agriculture that goes something like this: prior to the invention of the Haber-Bosch method for ammonia synthesis, people were miserably yoked to the soil as servants of the natural nitrogen cycle. But once Messrs Haber and Bosch had worked out how to transcend this nature-imposed limit, a world of abundant cheap food opened up for humanity…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Politics of Food | Chris Smaje

May 3, 2024

Lab-grown food vs small farms

What’s the future of food?

Last year, two of my former podcast guests had a long and very public disagreement about the politics of food, locking horns over the utility of farming in a densely-populated world. Activist and writer George Monbiot has written extensively about lab-grown food and the need to revolutionise our food systems with technology so that we can better feed everyone. Farmer and academic Chris Smaje has argued that farming is a critical component of community autonomy, and wrote a book in response to George’s own, Regenesis, criticising the vision as “eco-modernist”. George hit back that Chris’ proposal is a “cruel fantasy”.

I watched this unfold online, worried to see two experts disagree so deeply on something fundamental to how we organise society, and invited Chris back to talk about this second book, Saying No To A Farm-Free Future. Chris explains how our food production systems are emblematic of our crisis of relationship to the earth. He argues that de-materialising our food supply plays into the colonial history of uprooting people from the land and denigrating agriculture. This leads us to discuss land, language, and culture, decentralising power, and the political binaries that could be dissolved by grounding our thinking in the land.

Correction: The previous version of this interview stated that the debate between George Monbiot and Chris Smaje was around lab grown meat instead of lab grown food.

…click on the above link to listen to the interview…

Among the ancestors

April 21, 2024

Among the ancestors

Note to Substack readers. I replicate the essays that I publish on my chrissmaje.com site here on Substack. I’ve switched comments off here because I don’t want to juggle two parallel conversation threads, but if you’d like to discuss my essays feel free to join the conversation over on my website. Currently, all my content is free, but if you’d care to support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack, I’d be super appreciative!

I mentioned in a recent post that my mother died at the end of last year. This has imposed a certain amount of emotional and bureaucratic labour on me – one reason why I’ve been a bit less active on this blog of late. But now that she’s with the ancestors, I want to write something about ancestral connection in present times, taking my mother’s life as my starting point.

My mother was the eleventh and youngest child of Mary and James. James spent his working life as a coalminer in South Yorkshire. His great grandfather, John, was born in 1799 and farmed eight acres near Aberdeen – the last of my direct ancestors to my knowledge who worked primarily on the land. Mary’s father died in the Peckfield Colliery Disaster of 1896 when she was a month old. His name was William Sheldon. You can read about him here.

The Wikipedia entry about the disaster doesn’t mention this and I don’t know if it’s true, but a story handed down to me from my mother is that the colliery owners paid off the widows of the dead men up to the point in their shift when they were killed, and then left them to pick up the pieces (though it seems they stumped up 5% of the relief money later collected for the families. Thanks guys).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Open comment post: the AMOC shutdown and the future of agriculture

April 5, 2024

Open comment post: the AMOC shutdown and the future of agriculture

It’s time to move on to pastures new from my Saying NO… book, as I mentioned in my last post. Seems like an opportune moment to try an ‘open comment’ post to signal the change of direction, an idea I trailed at the start of the year.

What I think emerged from that discussion was for me to suggest a broad topic and perhaps a few talking points from it and then to see where things went in the discussion. Kind of like a normal post! Back then, Ruben wrote “ I would love to hear your thoughts on AMOC shutdown, drought, more frequent extreme weather, and other growing challenges for agriculture. That might be a good topic for an open post.” Indeed I believe it would be, so let’s go with that.

In case this is unfamiliar, the ‘AMOC’ is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the major current system in the Atlantic Ocean, involving the northward flow of warm water and the southward flow of colder water which helps moderate the climate of both colder high-latitude countries and warmer low-latitude ones. Studies have suggested that present human-caused climate change could result in the shutdown of the AMOC, the consequences for both colder and warmer countries within this Atlantic system being, not to overstate the case … very bad.

A recent study that models AMOC shutdown has put the heebie-jeebies up a lot of people, including me – see Prof Stefan Rahmstorf’s summary here. Seems like we could be on course for an AMOC shutdown tipping point within the next seventy years with 95 percent confidence…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

It takes an ecovillage…: some thoughts on ‘Going to Seed’

May 26, 2022

It takes an ecovillage…: some thoughts on ‘Going to Seed’

I enjoyed writing a book review for my last post so much that I’m going to write another one this time around. But whereas last time it was a long review of a very long book addressing itself to a large slice of human history, here I offer you a short review of a much shorter book about the life of a single man.

The man in question is Simon Fairlie, and the book is Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir (Chelsea Green, 2022). Disclosure: I know Simon a little, as I suspect do many people in England with more than a passing involvement in the movement for local, sustainable agriculture – testament either to the still regrettably small corps of people the movement commands, or perhaps more positively to Simon’s tireless efforts in making the case and spreading the word on numerous fronts. I’ve written for Simon’s excellent periodical The Land and there’s an endorsement from me inside his book. So, needless to say, I am not an unbiased observer.

Parts of Simon’s life story were therefore familiar to me as I read his memoir: cofounder of the influential low impact agricultural community, Tinker’s Bubble; land rights activist and rural planning expert; reviver of the fine art of scything; acutely perceptive agricultural thinker, whose book Meat: A Benign Extravagance is still the best-articulated vision of a just and sustainable small farm future I know. Other parts were newer to me: an upper-crust if unconventional childhood, dropping out in the 1960s and joining the hippy trail to India, 1990s road protesting and a brief stint in jail as a member of the Twyford Six (“an unwarranted honorific given the minimal degree of martyrdom we had to undergo”), work as a stonemason high aloft at Salisbury Cathedral…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rural gentrification Part II: Of localists and homesteaders

February 22, 2022

Rural gentrification Part II: Of localists and homesteaders

In this post, I discuss some issues about gentrification, localism and homesteading or neo-agrarianism, following on from my last post and the wider debate I referred to there.

Let’s begin with a word on gentrification, which is usually applied to urban situations where richer people avail themselves of cheaper property prices by moving into poorer neighbourhoods, resulting in rising real estate values over time that price the original inhabitants or their descendants out of the area, and changing its social character in ways more suited to the incomers than the original inhabitants.

As I see it, these trends are significant social problems but their framing as ‘gentrification’ raises some problems of its own, of which I’ll mention three. First, the gentrification narrative implicitly blames the affluent incomers, individualizing them as the source of the economic problems faced by the original inhabitants and thereby diverting attention from structural problems of poverty, inequality and housing access operating within the wider economy and its politics. Second, it also diverts attention from competing interests among the original inhabitants, not least the owners and sellers of property who benefit from rising prices and economic dynamism but figure as silent players in the gentrification story. Finally, it involves cultural conceptions of authenticity and threat – the locally authentic culture of the original inhabitants threatened by the cosmopolitan and inauthentic culture (or personhood?) of the incomers. Such conceptions could do with some further elaboration.

I’ll return to some of these points shortly, but I want to turn now to rural and agrarian gentrification. The urban gentrification picture I just described can apply equally to small rural towns and villages, with the same caveats, but when it comes to back-to-the-land neo-agrarian homesteading it gets a bit more complicated…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Warre and peace: of gifts, government and men with guns

January 27, 2022

Warre and peace: of gifts, government and men with guns

This is the last in a somewhat interrupted series of posts about property rights in small farm futures and small farm pasts, which started here, looked at the idea of work and self-ownership here, considered private property here and common property here. The missing piece in terms of standard definitions of property ownership is public or state ownership.

So here I’m going to address public ownership to complete this part of the blog cycle. But I’m not going to say much about the forms of state ownership emanating from national, federal or local government familiar from everyday modern politics. For one thing, the issues involved in those have been endlessly rehashed in standard political positions concerning the pros and cons of (big) government, and I have little to add to all that. More importantly, I don’t think this modern politics is going to survive in anything much like its familiar present forms as the various challenges of our present and future world begin to bite.

That prompts questions about what state power and public ownership might look like in the future viewed from the centres out – from London or Washington DC, New York or New Delhi, Beijing, Mumbai, Edinburgh, Juba, Dublin, Belfast, Brussels, Los Angeles, Sacramento and so on. But it also prompts questions about what political power and public ownership might look like in the more rural peripheries of these power centres.

My view, which could of course turn out to be wrong, is that the de facto power of the centres to organize life in these peripheries will wane, that more people will be living in many of these peripheries than they presently do, and that it’s in these peripheries that the most important and interesting political and economic innovations of the world to come will occur…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership

December 5, 2021

Of grain and gulags: a note on work, labour and self-ownership

I’ll begin with a brief account of how our modern global grain trading system was invented in Chicago in the 19^th century, which is maybe a bit of a jolt from the present focus of this blog cycle on the forms of property but hopefully my purposes will become clear.

Prior to the railroad/grain elevator/futures market nexus that began to emerge in the 1850s, prairie grain farmers sold their product in sacks that retained their identity with the source farm through to the point of sale. The innovation of the railroad/elevator system was to create standardized grades of grain that enabled the harvest from individual farms to be amassed together in vast quantities as a fungible commodity like money. The innovation of the futures market was to remove uncertainty about future price fluctuations, essentially by enabling speculators to assume the burden of the risk by betting on movements in grain prices. Before long, the value of the futures being traded greatly exceeded the value of the physical grain in existence.

These innovations called forth vastly more economic activity than previously possible, created a torrent of cheap grain that flooded global markets and pushed farmers in other places out of grain production (and often out of farming altogether), and stimulated the growth of prairie grain farming, while removing from farmers themselves substantial economic autonomy, fostering perhaps a self-interest on their part in the grading of their grain at the margin, but not a more holistic interest in the story of their grain from field to fork. They also pretty much forged the global economy as we know it today (I’ll ignore the meat/livestock side of the story for brevity, but the globalization of meat production was another prong to the same history)¹.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Property ownership in a small farm future

November 6, 2021

Property ownership in a small farm future

And so we come to the thorny issue of landownership and property rights in a small farm future, which I discuss in Chapter 13 of my book.

A lot of people I encounter profess complete disdain for the very idea of ‘owning’ land, usually along the lines of the words attributed to Chief Seattle: the earth does not belong to people, people belong to the earth.

Well, I agree. But my interest in landownership is not so cosmological. Less to do with the spirit, and more to do with the stomach. What I want to know is whether it’s OK for me and my folks to fish at this spot in the river, or sow wheat on this patch of land, or take firewood from this part of the woodland. And these are not trivial questions when you need to make a livelihood directly from the land among multitudes of other people, as I believe many or most of us will have to in the future.

It’s this relationship with other people that’s critical, and I believe isn’t as well understood as it should be by critics of the idea of ownership. If I say that I ‘own’ some land, this isn’t fundamentally a claim about my relationship to the land in question. It’s a claim about my relationship to other people in respect of the land – essentially that I have some agreed rights of appropriation in respect of the land that they do not. Fundamentally, property rights are social relations between people. And these relations can be parcelled up in almost endless ways. I may have appropriation rights over fishing a river, but only for certain kinds of fish, or at certain times of year, or if I offer certain gifts to a local dignitary or deity…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Small Farm Future: Why some anticipated problems will not arise

October 18, 2021

Small Farm Future: Why some anticipated problems will not arise

In his book Small Farm Future Chris Smaje worries about some problems that might arise in a society in which these kinds of farms meet most food demand. This area is also targeted by Alex Heffron and Kai Heron in their critique of the book, which their Marxist position leads them to see as only advocating a “petite-bourgeoise” vision and thus no satisfactory solution to the problems capitalism is causing. It seems to me that both are overlooking the fact that in the future conditions will be radically different to what they are now and will determine that the problems under discussion will be minimal if they arise at all.

The concerns are firstly to do with whether or not small farms mostly run by families will generate the kinds of conflicts that have been common in peasant societies in the past, especially to do with patriarchal domination and marginalisation of women and children, and secondly to do with whether it is satisfactory to leave the farming sector in the hands of private enterprise. Heffron and Heron do not make clear what they would want but it would seem that the core Marxist principle of eliminating private ownership of the means of production would lead them to advocate state ownership of the farming sector.

Both parties are analysing these issues in terms of how things worked in peasant societies and how things are organised and thought about in present society. My argument is that this is not the right approach, because things will be very different in the near future. So I must first take some space to explain my reasons for thinking this.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Pig apples: or, why small farmsteads are efficient and effective

October 18, 2021

Pig apples: or, why small farmsteads are efficient and effective

Nearly twenty years ago, we planted seven acres of woodland on our holding with help from a government grant that stipulated the trees must be native woodland varieties. Among the ones we chose were crab apples, which we planted along the rides and woodland edges because of their growth habit, sourcing the saplings from a nursery specializing in native woodland trees.

As the trees developed, it became clear they weren’t just ordinary crabs – I guess they’d crossed with cultivated varieties to produce large, juicy, dessert-apple type fruits. The fruits were still pretty unappealing to the human palate but not so, I discovered, to the porcine one. Over the years, our pigs have been happy to chow down on them without limit. In the last month or two of their lives, the two pigs I raised this year ate little else.

But since the apple trees are spread around the holding along the rides and it’s not really practicable to let the pigs range at large, this bounty involves us picking or collecting most of the apples for them. Recently, I’ve been going out at least a couple of times every day with a large trug, filling it with the not-quite-crabs, and taking it to the pig enclosure. After a while, a distinctive apple browse line developed on the trees at my 5’10” plus an arm length height. From then on, I contrived various tricks – jumping for apples, shaking them off the high boughs or pulling the branches down with my shepherd’s crook. When my son and his girlfriend visited, she sat on his shoulders and threw apples down from on high, one at a time into the trug.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our household farming future

September 1, 2021

Our household farming future

Back to the blog cycle about my book A Small Farm Future with a little more about household-based farming.

A couple of posts back Greg Reynolds suggested I might write some short declarative sentences about my case for household farming, which struck me as a good idea. So here’s my best shot at it.

To reiterate my basic position, I think we face a future of high climate, water and land/soil stress, lower energy and capital availability, and socioeconomic/political turbulence and contraction. In these circumstances, I think farm societies will emerge that are strongly based on smallholder households devoting much or most of their attention to the intensive cultivation of small land areas for meeting their own food and fibre needs.

This is not my vision of an ideal society – it’s just what I think a feasible human ecology will look like in probable future circumstances. As I see it, there could be better or worse kinds of household farm society, and in future posts I’ll discuss some of the possibilities for creating better ones within the framework of what I’ve called ‘least worst politics’ – in other words, how people can try to make the best of the challenging circumstances to come. But I’m not going to get into that here. In this post, I’m just going to lay out why I think we’ll see household farm societies in the future.

Where there are global commodity chains supported by cheap energy and cheap capital, producers tend to concentrate on a handful of highly processable and transportable crops (mostly cereals, grain legumes and oil crops). This enables them to maintain profitability through seeking economies of large scale (large farms with few workers and a lot of energy and capital-intensive infrastructure)…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How I grew, and lost, a rainforest

July 1, 2021

How I grew, and lost, a rainforest

And so I’ve come to the end of my posts concerning Part II of A Small Farm Future and I shall soon be moving onto Parts III and IV, which are the ones that have generated most of the discussions and disputations over the book. I include this post by way of a deep breath, reflecting back on the ground we’ve recently covered and forward toward what’s to come.

Let me begin by reprising the tale of our woodland here at Vallis Veg, which I’ve previously discussed here, among other places. Between 2004 and 2007 we planted seven acres of young saplings on our site, which have now grown into some pretty hefty trees providing numerous benefits – constructional timber, firewood, food, wildlife habitat, wind protection and recreation among them. I’ve discussed before the debate about whether it’s better to allow natural regeneration, or to force the issue by planting saplings, as we did. In any given situation there can be arguments either way, with the balance of them perhaps usually favouring the low input natural regeneration route.

But I’ve come to think of this debate as rather pointless. Given the human dominance of the farmed landscape, what really matters is the decision to opt for trees. If you take the natural regeneration route, you’ll probably lose several years of potential tree growth – which could be significant for humans on our short-run timescales, but not really significant on forest time. In our woodland, wild trees and herbaceous understory plants that we never designed into the system ourselves are beginning to make their presence felt. In a few decades, I don’t think it will have mattered much to anybody but ourselves during a few head-start years how the trees came about…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It isn’t nice to block the courtroom…

June 23, 2021

It isn’t nice to block the courtroom…

A bit of news from the home front here at Small Farm Future, and a few reflections based around it. Today, my wife received a suspended prison sentence for disrupting a court as an act of protest against government inaction on climate change. Here is a short video she made explaining her behaviour and making the case for radical action beyond business as usual, with her own vision focused around small-scale farming. Please share it with your networks if you’re minded to – pebbles, ripples and all that.

At an earlier court appearance, she was troubled to be told by a magistrate that her right to protest climate policy had to be balanced against the right of people such as car drivers to go about their business. In her view, this encapsulated the distorted priorities of our decisionmakers in effectively trading off present niceties with the very stability of Earth systems that enable human and other lives.

Here’s an excerpt from the livestream of the court disruption, and here she is talking outside the court after her sentence with Shel, her partner in non-crime, with some good points well made by both of them, in my opinion.

I don’t know if her course of action today was the right one. She and I have discussed many times the choices to be made in the face of the world’s present looming crises and the limited powers of individuals, including the individuals in government, to effect change. I don’t think there can ever be clear answers to the question of what is to be done. But I’m pretty sure that we do need to do something orders of magnitude faster and deeper than current climate policies if we’re to meet the challenge. So why not glue yourself to a courtroom? It’s not as if anything else is working much better.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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