Chris Smaje

After studying then teaching and researching in social science and policy, I became a small-scale commercial veg grower in 2007. Nowadays, when I’m not writing about the need to design low-impact local food systems before they’re foisted on us by default, I spend my time as an aspiring woodsman, stockman, gardener and peasant on the small farm I help to run in Somerset, southwest England

Though smallholding, small-scale farming, peasant farming, agrarianism – call it what you will – has had many epitaphs written for it over the years, I think it’s the most likely way for humanity to see itself through the numerous crises we currently face in both the Global North and South. In my writing and blogging I attempt to explain why. The posts are sometimes practical but mostly political, as I try to wrestle with how to make the world a more welcoming place for the smallholder.

Chris is the author of A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth, and most recently, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case for an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods.

Of settlers, colonists and doomers

Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Here’s how I’d parse it: being a settler is going to be an increasingly common human experience in the future. Lasch teaches us useful things about the politics of settler livelihood-making, while Ghosh teaches us useful things about how settlers must avoid becoming settler-colonists.

November 20, 2023

Back to the future through mixed farming

Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

So it’ll be a case of back to the future with mixed farming as a key component of the food system (not everywhere, because we’re talking local context, not one size fits all solutionism … but mixed farming in its endless local variants will loom large).

November 6, 2023

New worlds to build

Chris Smaje, Resilience.org

There’s real work of transformative adaptation to do to rise to present challenges – unsung, grassroots and local.

October 23, 2023

The wholeness of the word: ‘Regenesis’ as myth, Part II

Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Myths speak through individual authors and are given definition by them, but they’re painted on a bigger canvas than any one person.

October 4, 2023

The wholeness of the word: ‘Regenesis’ as myth, Part I

Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

But if abundant low-carbon energy doesn’t immediately materialise, or if it’s used to grow the human economy and its footprint, then Monbiot’s farmfree solutionism offers no solutions to real present predicaments.

September 25, 2023