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Chris Smaje

Chris Smaje has coworked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last 17 years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College on aspects of social policy, social identities and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agroecology, he's written for various publications, such as The Land , Dark Mountain , Permaculture magazine and Statistics Views, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and the Journal of Consumer Culture . Smaje writes the blog Small Farm Future, is a featured author at www.resilience.org and a current director of the Ecological Land Co-op. Chris' latest book is: A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth.

A Small Farm Future

Commons and households in a small farm future

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

To what extent does the peasant way inherently impose certain kinds of social structure, to what extent can we now exercise different choices over those structures, and how might peasant societies of the future differ from or resemble ones of the past?

  • July 22, 2021
A Small Farm Future

Least worst politics

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Instead of the ‘best of all possible worlds’, then, the responsibility is to identify the ‘least bad of all likely worlds’ and the ways it may be realized.

  • July 7, 2021
managed woodland

How I grew, and lost, a rainforest

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

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.

  • July 1, 2021
A Small Farm Future

It isn’t nice to block the courtroom…

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Nobody can possibly say how these complex intersecting crises will pan out. For sure, nobody can say that they’re certain to pan out well.

  • June 23, 2021
A Small Farm Future

My week of eating locally

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Since my book A Small Farm Future makes quite a play for local self-reliance, I thought I should at least temporarily try to put my money (or, more pertinently, my produce) where my mouth is by only eating food produced on my farm for a week.

  • June 14, 2021
A Small Farm Future

What’s in a number?

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

But I don’t feel too guilty because, as I said above, I think Britain can feed itself well with low impact, low energy and low yield methods. The main problems lie elsewhere.

  • June 3, 2021
rice paddies

Labour on the farm

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

So there is no virtue in having a labour-lean, capital-intensive agriculture when labour is abundant and capital is thin on the ground. It will not improve quality of life, which is a more powerful underlying aim than mere ‘efficiency’.

  • May 26, 2021
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