Smallholdings and small magazines

Yesterday at the newsagents, I was more than a little surprised to see not one, but two magazines devoted to smallholdings. One called ‘Smallholder’ and the other ‘Smallholdings’. What staggers me is not that there is a magazine for smallholders, there’s a magazines for just about everything these days, as the existence of ‘backscratcher collector’ proves; but that two magazines could have such different editorial approaches to the same subject that it could support two magazines. What in the world could one offer that the other could not? Surely there’s only so much you can write about getting mud out from underneath your fingernails and sticking your hand up a pig’s arse for fun and profit.

I love the idea that the second magazine might have been started after the editorial team had a massive falling out about creosote and the two publications are as polarised in their opinions as The Daily Mail and any real newspaper. Either that or one of the magazines has been started up by some hip young gunslinger who thinks wants to sweep away the old fuddy-duddy conventions of smallholding and is not afraid to use the term ‘boutique farming’ in front of others.

I love that there is no profession so obscure, no hobby so odd that it can’t support its own little magazine, be it the full glossy or a fanzine produced in a basement in Solihull titled something like ‘Swafega Collector (incorporating ‘Laiths and Laithmen’)’.