With the world around us going to heck in a hand basket books like this (and pretty much anything else in the Chelsea Green catalogue) strikes a deeper cord than it may have reading a few years prior.
Focusing on resilience and self sustenance in a time when folks are realizing how little if it they have.

Thank you for the opportunity to preview this it did prompt me to purchase a copy from the Chelsea Green Publishing site and I encourage everyone to support this amazing small press!

This is a serious piece of writing about an issue that deeply affects us all, whether we care to acknowledge it or not. The author covers a huge number of inter-related topics which affect how we live, farm, eat, etc. He starts by laying out the issues are they stand, It's a heavy-going book and at over 300 pages I'd recommend this for someone who has an interest in this area already, but I would definitely recommend it!

A Small Farm Future is an expository essay in several parts making a case for a fundamental paradigm shift toward self-sufficiency, local economy, and responsible resource allocation and use. Due out 21st Oct 2020 from Chelsea Green Publishing, it's 320 pages and will be available in paperback format.

This is a well written and thorough examination of the current paradigm for food production, resource use, transportation and global interdependency. The introduction includes some background and the genesis of the book along with a cautionary tale about the nature of consumerism told through the parable of the civet cat and the manufacture and trade in kopi luwak coffee.

The first section covers the problems challenging modern civilization: population, climate, energy, soil, water, land, health/nutrition, politics, and culture. The author writes persuasively and confidently, and I found myself nodding along at several places. The only problem is that much (most) of this book feels like "preaching to the choir". For the people who are liberal, compassionate, dreamers, and who want peace love life and prosperity for everyman, this is resounding truth, obvious and undeniable. For the people who are Ayn Rand economic darwinists (altruism = *bad*, unfettered self-interest = *good*) they'll either pop an aneurysm by page 23 or else throw/burn the book and bury the ashes with a barrowload of garlic at a crossroads somewhere - they're not likely to be swayed from what they believe and they'll continue consuming at a breakneck pace until the inevitable collapse.

That being said, there is quite a lot of information here. There are templates and theoretical gardens for different uses and niches in the locally driven society. The author continues building the thought-picture with the ideas of how these local farms could entertwine to build up local communities which could better withstand the coming contraction from the unsustainable system we are living in currently.

In a number of ways, his writing reminds me of a whimsical cross between Thoreau and John Seymour. For people longing for a better way, this book does have the ring of truth. For people saying "we can't afford that"... they're not likely to be swayed. I think the ideas are important and anyone who is paying any kind of attention sees that as a species we're sailing directly for the rocks, and we have to do something, but I'm not sure how much practical application can be found in this book. It can start the important conversations though, and that's worthwhile.

Four stars. Recommended for self sufficiency readers, smallholders, politicians, sociology readers, and the like. The book includes copious notes and an extensive bibliography and will be a rich source to mine for further information. There's also a cross-referenced index.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Wildly ... Imaginative... Reasoning, Close Yet Still Incorrect Conclusion. Most any math teacher (even former ones like myself) have stories of situations where when told to "show their work", a student somehow has so-incorrect-as-to-nearly-be-incomprehensible reasoning, but somehow still manages to wind up at an answer that is close but still not quite correct. Maybe a decimal point in the wrong position, but the right actual digits in the right sequence, for example. Another example relevant here would be a space mission to explore Jupiter's moon Europa that somehow launches when Jupiter is at its furthest point from Earth and launches away from Jupiter (or any reasonable path to the planet) to boot... and yet still manages to wind up on Callisto - another of the Galilean Moons of Jupiter with similar properties, though not the originally intended target and not as rich in desired attributes for the science aboard the mission.

This is effectively what Smaje has done here. More conservative readers may not make it even halfway into the first chapter, which is little more than a *very* thinly veiled anti-capitalist diatribe. Even more liberal/ progressive readers will have some tough pills to swallow with Smaje's ardent defense of at least some forms of private property as the chief means of achieving his goals. And at the end, Smaje does in fact manage to do at least some version of what he sets out to do - make some level of a case for A Small Farm Future. The case Smaje makes here is indeed intriguing, despite being so deeply flawed, and absolutely worthy of further examination and discussion. It seems that he is simply too blinded by his own political and philosophical backgrounds to truly make the case as it arguably should have been made. Recommended.