THE GOLDEN HOOF AND GREEN MANURE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 83

necessary, and meat is integral to the whole system. Here is John Seymour, participating in
a debate on meat-eating published by The Ecologist in 1976:
The great pioneers of high farming in England, who eventually taught good
farming to the whole world, base their whole practice on the beneficial interactions
between plants and animals. Coke of Norfolk's motto was 'a full bullock yard makes
a full stackyard'. He didn't worry about how much protein a bullock takes to convert
into a kilogram of beef, he was chiefly interested in the great tonnages of beautifully
composted wheat straw that those bullocks made under their feet. He raised the fertil-
ity of his fifty thousand acres of light land in Norfolk so that it produced two tons of
wheat to the acre, where before such a figure would have been unbelievable. That was
all done by the manure of bullocks and the treading and dunging of folded sheep. 1
I don't know where Seymour got the figure of two tons an acre from - possibly, since he
was in live debate, off the top of his head. Coke in 1816 said he got yields of between 42
and 48 bushels, which (at 60lbs per bushel) is between 1,125 kilos and 1,285 kilos. 2 Even
so this was impressive compared with yields in previous centuries, which were as low as
12 bushels per acre - particularly since he started with 'a thin sandy soil [which] produced
but a scanty yield of rye.' 3 It wasn't until 1998 that the average US yield of wheat broke
the 40 bushel barrier. 4 Modern day East Anglian grain barons are now getting up to 150
bushels an acre, but the dryland-farmers of the US and Canadian prairies - whose viability
depends upon the vast amounts of land they have at their disposal rather than what they put
unto it - have yet to catch up with Coke.
During the medieval period most land was cultivated under a two or three year rotation,
during which half or a third of the land remained fallow for one year, and fertility was en-
hanced, for example, by folding animals which had been grazing on common land during
the day and on the arable land at night. The problem during the later middle ages was that
as population increased the amount of corn (ie grain) being grown was increasing, while
the amount of pasture and hence of manure was declining: 'The frontier between grass
and corn was moving away from grass towards corn all over the areas of mixed farms
throughout the Middle Ages,' wrote M M Postan. 'In the course of the 13th century, and
perhaps even earlier, the frontier not only approached, but in many places crossed its limits
of safety … By the beginning of the following century, in corn growing parts of the country
taken as a whole, pasture and the animal population had been reduced to a level incompat-
ible with the conduct of mixed farming.' 5 Corn yields declined and as they declined there
was a need to cultivate even greater areas.
Temporary relief from this spiral of decline occurred in the middle of the 14th century
with the timely intervention of the Black Death, which reduced the population by about