Some might like to join. Sorry for the delay in forwarding, I'm very slow
getting through my email box at the moment!!!



Regards

Karen

x



From: Smallholders Online [mailto:letter@...]
Sent: 05 July 2009 22:49
To: karenr@...
Subject: Smallholders Newsletter No. 290



Smallholders Online Newsletter Number 290

A message from Alan

Dear readers,

I'll come straight to the point - this will be the last issue of the email
newsletter.

This may come as a surprise to many of you, but for the team of three who
work behind the scenes to produce and circulate these newsletters, the
proverbial writing has been on the wall for some time now and change had
become inevitable.

When Ron Skingley and I founded Smallholders Online in January 2002, it was
a natural progression from the informal email circle that had proved so
effective during the foot and mouth crisis of the previous year. Our vision
then was for a national smallholders forum that would provide a focal point
for existing local groups and encourage the formation of new ones. FMD had
shown that smallholding was disjointed, unrepresented and ignored at every
level of decision making; we wanted to change that, and help to draw the
many different threads together for the common good.

Time has shown that smallholders have no interest in working together for
any purpose other than smallholding itself. Even at a local level, thriving
self-help groups are very few and far between, so that large areas of the UK
have no formal network at all. Perhaps this is unsurprising - after all,
smallholding by its very nature attracts independent and self-reliant types
who just want to get on with their lives. As a consequence, Smallholders
Online gradually transformed into a website that offered a useful starting
point for beginners, plus a regular service that delivered news and informed
comment to your Inbox. We know, from the volume of emails and Helpline
enquiries received and answered over the years, that we have encouraged many
newcomers to get started, and this alone has made the effort worthwhile.

Ron outlines below just how much things have changed in recent years. The
time has come to recognise those changes and to incorporate them into the
way we interact with one another. So it's goodbye Smallholders Online, and
hello Smallholders Network! I leave Sky to explain the new Network in more
detail below.

Online social networking is new to me personally, and I suspect to many of
you also, but Sky's wife Marian has considerable experience in running and
contributing to other networks, and we are fortunate that she has assisted
the Smallholders Network to get started - thank you, Marian. This way of
communicating is experiencing extraordinary growth and we hope that it may
suit smallholders too. Please take a few minutes to familiarise yourselves
with the concepts and capabilities of networking, and we look forward to
communicating with you through the Smallholders Network in the very near
future. To join, just click on this link:

http://smallholders.ning.com/?xgi=27dFqOb <http://smallholders.ning.com/>

I cannot close without saying "thank you" to all those who have contributed
in some way to past newsletters; and on a personal note, to say that it has
been a privelege and a pleasure to work on Smallholders Online with Ron
Skingley and Sky McCain - my sincere thanks to you both.

With very best wishes

Alan Beat

_____


From Ron Skingley

Back in January 2002 the smallholding world was a different place. The
effects of F&M were still spreading rather than diminishing. Alan's email
newsletter was still a lifeline in the post F&M world. We started the
website as a sort of 'add-on' to the newsletter, hoping that it might become
some sort of centre of the 'smallholders web world' as it was then.

Since then we have seen a huge difference in the general media and public
awareness of farming and food production. Even gardening, which in those
days was still just gardening, has changed. If you look at BBCs Gardeners
World, that has changed from tips on when to plant your begonias, to organic
vegetables and biodiversity. It's now quite common for people to talk about
organic, biodiversity, food security, self-sufficiency, renewable energy,
and so on. On prime-time TV we now have programmes about city farming,
raising chickens on allotments, and alternative energy systems. We have well
known chefs running campaigns against factory farming, and for better more
healthy school meals.

I remember talking to Diana (then editor of Country Smallholding magazine)
about forums, and she said they were 'looking at it'. Now it's common-place
and we have forums on every magazine website, and many that are not
associated with mags. There are gardening forums, chicken forums and
smallholding forums.

Where once upon a time smallholding, and self-sufficiency in particular,
were 'alternative' ideas and much associated with hippies and drop-outs in
normal people's minds, now it's the 'in' thing. We even have TV programmes
about moving to the country and 'changing lifestyles'. There's city councils
setting up new allotment schemes, schools actually teaching vegetable
gardening to children, and a current demand for seeds and all things
vegetable growing that exceeds supply.

The role that Smallholders Online was once designed to fulfil now seems to
be very well catered for by other means. I may say "thank goodness" to that,
as the spread of this sort of attitude and information was exactly what we
were aiming for.

Is this a case of 'mission accomplished'?

Then there's the tightening up of spam controls and the current technical
problems of sending 900+ newsletters via email when you haven't got loads of
money to spend. Yes, there are companies that will handle all your
newsletter needs - at a price.

On the server front we've had an invasion by crooks and fraudsters, and
we've also recently had someone else on the same, shared, server sending
spam that has resulted in us being black listed. That problem is still
on-going and is not proving easy for the ISP to solve.

We get email rejections because:
mailbox is full: retry timeout exceeded
recipient rejected
mailbox disabled
message was forwarded more than the maximum allowed times
rejected because of unacceptable content.

This last is almost impossible to cure. I talked to one IT chap in a
university about their spam filters and pointed out that if you are talking
about hatching chickens you are going to mention, at some point,
auto-xxxing. You can imagine what that phrase does to a spam filter! Overall
I can see the spam restrictions and risks being a major headache in the
future, even more so than now.

Currently I subscribe to a three Yahoo Groups, one of which is smallholding
associated (Growing Awareness).
This works very well for communication between like-minded people, and there
are no newsletter/spam problems.

There is a danger here of all this sounding rather negative. But I think
it's very positive.

The UK, if not the whole western world, has become farming, smallholder and
gardening conscious. The origin of food, what it contains, how it was
produced and so on is now almost headline news. Even the U.S. President's
wife is making a statement by having an organic vegetable garden. And the US
Agribusiness Super-Corporations are suitably annoyed. Good. This is another
indication that the whole subject has reached that critical mass, and now
cannot stop.

So the time has come to move on.
Life is like that.
Somtimes we hang on to what we have just because we have it.

It has been a very rewarding experience, working with Alan and Sky.
Technically it has sometimes driven me mad with frustration. But knowing it
was all in a good cause has made it worthwhile.

To not admit that closing the newsletter is a weight off my shoulders would
be fooling myself. At last I have time to devote to smallholding, or perhaps
more rightly, tinyholding, as we have only a small area since moving to
Ireland. And there's the old wooden boat to restore and get sailing again.
The workshop beckons, not to mention the amazing countryside and coast of
West Cork that is still waiting to be explored.

I will miss the newsletter. I will miss Sky's passionate condemnation of
'Corporate Power'. I will miss Alan's concise explanations. But... all these
will still be there in other forms of communication.

Personally, I shall enjoy 'doing my own thing', and that I believe is the
way forward. It used to be called 'leading by example', but now that
smallholding, selfsufficiency and food awareness has taken hold of the
world's media, everyone can be a leader by example. This is especially so
with the internet now providing so many different ways of sharing
information and personal experience.

So it's not just moving on, but moving forward. The future holds sustainable
living, growing our own food, cycling instead of driving, sailing instead of
fossil-fuel-power transport maybe, generating our own electricity from wind
or water (or even a wood fuelled steam engine?), buying local, bartering,
sharing, and let us not forget that most basic of communication methods -
talking to people (the pub is recommended for this).

Welcome to the New World.

Ron.



_____


From Sky McCain


Dear subscribers and friends,


Where has the time gone? It certainly doesn't seem like over three years
have passed since I started working with Alan and Ron on the Smallholders
Online Newsletter. I sincerely thank Ron and Alan for the opportunity to be
associated with both of them in such a pleasant way and thank all of you who
have written to me over the years.

Although the number of subscribers has doubled, viewed in business as a very
positive thing, it appears to me that in this case the numbers have exceeded
our capacity to handle them with the old structure. Thankfully, our new
social network is not the end of a cooperative venture in support of
smallholders, but just a change of structure bringing advantages and
disadvantages common to all major changes.

What specifically do I mean? Well, you will no longer be a passive receiver
of text. All of you had to subscribe through www.smallholders.org. Now you
will be required to sign up to our public network at
http://smallholders.ning.com, or simply click
http://smallholders.ning.com/?xgi=27dFqOb
<http://smallholders.ning.com/?xgi=27dFqOb> to join.

A Ning social network contains quite a few remarkable features. There are
actually too many of them for me to explain ALL of them here. Like some
websites, the features are down the middle of your page and across the top
of the MAIN page. Let me, however, name a few that I think you might like.

(1) You can start special interest groups and join existing groups. In the
group you can participate in discussions, ask questions and receive answers.
Groups may either be private or open to all. This means that existing
organizations (e.g. regional smallholders' groups) can use the network to
set up online groups exclusive to their own members if they wish to.

(2) There is a forum that you can post questions, comments, and
observations. This replaces the helpline.

(3) You can designate certain people as "friends" and this allows you to
exchange private messages with them.

(4) Instead of sending text, videos and graphics to Alan or myself for the
newsletter, you can post them yourself to share with everyone, your friends
only or a special interest group.

(5) There is a chat capability where you can text people who are also online
at the moment. If you don't want to be seen online, then you can click on
the green dot and hide yourself.

Don't be afraid to just try stuff you see on your page. Check out the
capabilities and post questions on my wall if you need help. [Or just send
me a message]

I am responsible for moderation. I will check all activity every morning
and get rid of any unwelcome visitors, such as spammers - not that we expect
many of those. If I chuck someone off for spamming, all of their content is
also immediately removed. The last thing I want is for you to be subjected
to any unwelcome material.

Using a social network can actually be a lot of fun and is certainly a lot
cheaper than telephone calls. Personally, I like telephone calls but
obviously there are many things that I like to do on the network. Does it
take a lot of your time? That is completely up to you. Once you have
formed a habit of looking quickly at the recent activity to see if anything
has happened that interests you, social networking need not be a drain on
your time. Thankfully, you are in control of exactly when and for how long
you stay online with it and of how many - if any - alerts the network sends
you by email. For me, checking the network once or twice a day is better
than being interrupted with telephone calls and possibly a message saying
that I owe somebody a return call.

Hopefully, you will come to the conclusion that this network brings you a
degree of friendliness and closeness never achievable in email.

At least, please give it a fair trial.

Best wishes,

Sky

_____

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