{"id":55558,"date":"2020-11-09T08:04:42","date_gmt":"2020-11-09T13:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55558"},"modified":"2020-11-09T08:04:42","modified_gmt":"2020-11-09T13:04:42","slug":"both-hands-now-an-introduction-to-a-small-farm-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55558","title":{"rendered":"Both hands now \u2013 an introduction to \u2018A Small Farm Future\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"post-image\">\n<div class=\"fimg-wrapper fimg-cl\">\n<div class=\"featured-image\">\n<div class=\"fimg-inner\">\n<h3 class=\"vm-wrapper\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2020\/11\/both-hands-now-an-introduction-to-a-small-farm-future\/\">B<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2020\/11\/both-hands-now-an-introduction-to-a-small-farm-future\/\">oth hands now \u2013 an introduction to \u2018A Small Farm Future\u2019<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"vm-middle\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"backstretch\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/20201023_152113-002.jpg\" \/><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<section class=\"post-content\">Today I\u2019m going to begin my cycle of posts commenting on, expanding and perhaps occasionally qualifying the analyses in my book\u00a0<em>A Small Farm Future<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>You\u00a0<em>have<\/em>\u00a0bought your copy by now, right? Ah well \u2026 far be it from me to tell you what to do with your hard-earned cash. Suffice to say that I\u2019m not planning to summarise or repackage what\u2019s in the book, so if you haven\u2019t read it or aren\u2019t an old hand on this blog, some of these posts may be a little mystifying in places. Others, though, should work as standalone pieces. One way or another, I hope you\u2019ll find something of interest and perhaps some things worthy of debate within them.<\/p>\n<div class=\"white\">\n<div id=\"slider_3472166\" class=\"owl-carousel sa_owl_theme autohide-arrows owl-loaded\" data-slider-id=\"slider_3472166\">\n<div class=\"owl-stage-outer owl-height\">\n<div class=\"owl-stage\">\n<div class=\"owl-item active\">\n<div id=\"slider_3472166_slide05\" class=\"sa_hover_container\">\n<p>I\u2019m going to work my way through the book roughly in page order. The book starts with \u2018The Civet\u2019s Tale\u2019, which I sketched in order to make the point that, almost invariably, the choices we make have downsides as well as upsides, perhaps in agriculture more than in most areas of life (and, unfortunately or otherwise, agriculture is at the root of all those other areas of life).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Another way of putting this, following on from my\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2020\/10\/the-us-election-perspectives-from-an-ear-of-grain\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">previous post<\/a>, is that after only death and taxes (in fact, before taxes), a certainty in life is\u00a0<em>trade-offs<\/em>. Arguing this puts me in the company of mainstream economists, whose discipline proceeds largely from the concept of opportunity cost or decision-making in circumstances of scarcity. There are those \u2013 often on the political left, my own political home turf \u2013 who insist that such notions are a conceit of our capitalist economic system, which manufactures an artificial scarcity.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Both hands now \u2013 an introduction to \u2018A Small Farm Future\u2019 Today I\u2019m going to begin my cycle of posts commenting on, expanding and perhaps occasionally qualifying the analyses in my book\u00a0A Small Farm Future. You\u00a0have\u00a0bought your copy by now, right? Ah well \u2026 far be it from me to tell you what to do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[20,15683,1912,7391,9738,30552],"class_list":["post-55558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-survival-2","tag-agriculture","tag-chris-smaje","tag-food-production","tag-scarcity","tag-small-farm-future","tag-the-civets-tale"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55559,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55558\/revisions\/55559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}