New year's greetings from Small Farm Future

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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 the conference and would like to say hello, do get in touch via the contact form.

I’ll also be doing an interview with writer and Oxford Real Farming Conference co-founder Colin Tudge, which hopefully will make it out onto the airwaves sometime soon. I’m lined up to do a few festival talks and podcasts in the coming year too, so watch this space for more info on those. Here’s one I did at the end of last year with Josh and Jason on the Doomer Optimist podcast.

I have some family and offline stuff to sort out for a few weeks after the Real Farming Conference. Hopefully I’ll start posting new material again here towards the end of the month or the beginning of February, and will continue in that vein through the year, albeit probably at a lower rate than was the case when this blog was in its ardent youth.

I’m planning to start winding down my engagements around my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future soon, and turn to a new book project. Saying NO… has probably achieved about as much as could reasonably be expected of it under the circumstances. I doubt it’s changed the minds of many among the ecomodernist inclined, but I know for sure that it’s changed some people’s minds and it’s helped a few others steer a path through the fog of hype about farm-free business as usual and manufactured food. So I think I have to be satisfied with that. A certain amount of bluster and ridicule has come my way in response to the book, but I haven’t come across much serious empirical or analytical critique. As I see it, the book’s arguments have stood up pretty well so far.

There are a few issues raised in it, or that other people have raised in respect of it, that nevertheless seem worth exploring in more detail, so I’m still planning to write a short blog cycle about some of these – including energy futures, the possibilities for agrarian localism to feed people, and the nature of global hunger. More on those soon, I hope.

Meanwhile, Steve L has been keeping an eye on recent news from the alt-protein industry – see his useful comments on this blog starting here. I was particularly interested in the report of a former bacterial protein executive now involved in a new food-tech venture based around … beans. Seems like a straw in the wind. Given the energetics, I don’t think it’s too wild a punt to suggest that food in the future will remain overwhelmingly a product of farmed soil. Steve’s reports suggest that manufactured protein ventures seem to be struggling to attract funding, I suspect for rather obvious reasons from the point of view of people risking their own money (the big push for government investment is no surprise in this context). One way or another, bacterial protein powder is already beginning to look like yesterday’s fad. But I daresay it’ll take a few more years for the bubble to burst, by which time some new saviour technology will doubtless be vacuuming up attention.

I believe the real work of regenesis lies elsewhere, mainly in the sphere of politics, and that’s what I want to turn my attention to in future writing. I’ll say more about that once I’ve completed the present blog cycle.

A couple of proposed innovations on this blog to close with for now – I’d welcome any comments.

First, it’s been suggested to me that I might have periodic ‘open house’ posts, where I leave it to readers to suggest topics of current or general interest they’d like to discuss with me and other commenters on the site. Any thoughts? I might find myself resorting to it to give myself a break from writing blog posts, so I’m personally a fan…

Second, I thought I might put at the bottom of some posts, or maybe every post, my current reading matter. This is something Brian Miller does on his blog, which I like. I’ve resisted doing it partly because it sometimes takes me an embarrassingly long time to get through a single book. But these days I usually find myself reading several books at once over different timeframes. Listing them could be a point of interest for the blog, while also encouraging me to keep up with my schedule. So as a trial let me begin with a list of what I’ve been leafing through over the holiday period, listed in order of progress made so far:

Amitav Ghosh The Nutmeg’s Curse

Taras Grescoe The Lost Supper

Neil Price The Children of Ash & Elm

John Hoffman Sovereignty

Philip Loring Finding Our Niche

Robin Noble Under the Radiant Hill

Stephen Moss Ten Birds That Changed the World

Helena Norberg-Hodge et al Life After Progress

One thing that leaps out at me from that list is that it’s mostly white and male. Perhaps another useful function of public pronouncement is to improve the diversity in my reading matter. So … let me know what you think of this idea, or indeed your book recommendations.

Happy new year, and hopefully see you here again soon.