Stonehead’s Recent Comments

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  You can lead a horse to water, but...

  We work a croft in Scotland on a site that's had human occupation for at least 2,000 years. Our buildings have been here for 200 years, the local kirk has a headstone dating to the early 1100s, and the stone circle across the road from our croft dates to the Neolithic.

  We're largely unmechanised--I've just spent a couple of days mowing with a scythe--but produce sufficient meat (pork, lamb and chicken), vegetables, soft fruit and tree fruit to be reasonably self-sufficient. We also shoot, trap and forage from the wild larder.

  In fact, we do so well that we often have seasonal surpluses that we had thought we could swap, barter or sell within our local community. But we've found that most people hereabouts don't want local produce--they prefer the "clean", "hygienic", uniform and packaged produce from supermarkets.

  We sell eggs and vegetables to people who live in the city an hour's drive away, but almost none to the people in our village. We sell pork and chicken to people who live three hours away, but only two people in the village will buy it. We can trade jams, pickles, chutneys, preserves, saved seeds and the like with people all around the country, but not to locals.

  What makes it even more peculiar is that the locals readily concede we're not doing anything remotely "hippyish"--we're simply doing what they or their parents did until 20-30 years ago.

  Farms hereabouts used to be mixed family concerns, with cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, barley, oats, potatoes, vegetables and fruit. The fields were worked in rotation, with few synthetic chemical inputs, using seeds of plants that grew well in our conditions.

  Now, the pig sties are empty, the field housing is rotting in a corner, the vegetables are long gone and the fruit trees grubbed out. Now, sheep and cattle are intensively produced for the supermarkets, heavily fertilised and sprayed barley is grown for the brewers, and even more intensively sprayed oil seed rape is grown for vegetable oil/biodiesel. The farming families eat processed burgers and ready meals, while they lament how little they get for what they produce.

  It's a funny old world.On Can locavores embrace a truly place-based agriculture? posted 1 year, 3 months ago 14 Responses