Linkage of the day

[trixtah]

Firstly, via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, for all you crafty types out there: What Not to Crochet. Just have your brain bleach and the rusty pins for the suffering eyeballs at the ready. And the blog wins for coining the term "poncho-derived child abuse". I had a crochet'd poncho as a kidlet in the early 70s, and I thought it was naff even then (funnily enough, I don't mind woven ponchos. Without tassels or garish colours.)

Secondly, a piece by George Monbiot in the Grauniad last week, on how small farms are apparently more productive than industrial farms (just ignore the stupid first para on Mugabe).

Though the rich world's governments won't hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.
...
The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers. Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower than on large farms (they don't have to spend money recruiting or supervising workers), while the quality of the work is higher.

These small farms, of course, are the entire basis of the fair trade movement - if that didn't exist, how many more apparently less efficient industrial farms would we have? Anyways, interesting food for thought, so to speak.