In 2007 Chris Smaje gave up his comfortable and pensionable job as an academic in sociology to embark on a year-long tour of Canada with his wife Cordelia and their three sons – and then the Smajes started a market-garden/smallholding near Frome in Somerset where they have lived and worked ever since. Along the way Chris wrote two highly successful books. In the first, Small Farm Future, he argues that the future of farming, and indeed of the world, must lie with small farms – and not with the high-tech industrial monocultures that are now becoming the norm. The second, Say No to a Farm-free Future, is in large part a riposte to George Monbiot’s widely publicised thesis that the world would be better off if there were no farms at all – just factories producing provender of a kind from bacteria.
In this webinar (which will also be available as a podcast) Chris discusses his experiences as a small farmer in an unsympathetic economic climate, and his grand ideas for a future, agrarian world.
Ruth and I are extremely grateful once more to Brett Price, who filmed, recorded, and edited the interview – carried out in Oxford just before this year’s ORFC.
Listen to the podcast