1. Home
  2. Authors
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

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
Episode 18

What if a revolution in our relation to land unlocked a revolution of the imagination?

By Rob Hopkins, Josina Calliste, Chris Smaje, Rob Hopkins blog

In today’s episode we bring together Josina Calliste, a health professional and community organiser who is one of the co-founders of Land in Our Names (LION), a black-led collective addressing land inequalities affecting black people and people of colour’s ability to farm and grow food in Britain, and Chris Smaje, author of the book ‘A Small Farm Future‘ and the brilliant blog of the same name.

  • January 21, 2021
A Small Farm Future

Where the story takes us

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Chapters 1 and 2 of my book tell a story about how our current modern global civilization has got itself into a mess by disregarding some such factors that complicate its tale of endless self-improvement.

  • January 18, 2021
A Small Farm Future

Automation and a small farm future

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

One way to address the impasse of the present global political economy may be to embrace the possibility of creating a labour-intensive, semi-autonomous livelihood through farming, homesteading or gardening largely on one’s own account, within a wider society which is collectively oriented to enabling people to live that way.

  • January 11, 2021
×Close