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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

Some further thoughts on organic fertility

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

I’m going to continue my theme from my last post about organic fertility in future farming, picking up on a few of the very interesting comments that people made in response to it.

  • April 6, 2021
A Small Farm Future

Can organic farming feed the world?

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

I discuss various aspects of so-called ‘alternative’ agriculture at some length in Chapter 6 of A Small Farm Future, and I don’t intend to retrace many of those steps here. But there’s a couple of further things I do want to say in this blog cycle. Here, I’ll focus on organic farming.

  • March 25, 2021
A Small Farm Future

Home is not the house but where the garden is

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

My title is a quotation from archaeologist Francis Pryor’s book about ‘prehistoric’ Britain, but it serves well enough as a summary of the general argument in my own book about our likely global future, and the need to refocus the household from a place of economy to a place of ecology

  • March 15, 2021
A Small Farm Future

From the arable corner to the recaptured garden

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

So, to escape the arable corner, the forms of state coercion associated with it and the ecological problems it creates I argue that our best chance is by becoming our own arable farmers, or rather mixed-arable gardeners...

  • March 3, 2021
A Small Farm Future

Swidden as politics

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

But the choice of swidden that interests me most for my present purposes is when it’s adopted as a way to avoid being caught in a political net of constant productivity gain and, ultimately, state centralization and ‘modernization’.

  • February 25, 2021
A Small Farm Future

The awkward class

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Time to talk about peasants, who I claim in Chapter 3 of my book A Small Farm Future will soon be returning to tend (or create) a small farm near you. Or may in fact include you or your descendants.

  • February 8, 2021
A Small Farm Future

Can the peasant speak?

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

As I see it, the case for a turn to peasant farming today is about trying to meet the challenges of the present, not about trying to recross that unbridgeable and silent river of history.

  • January 25, 2021
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