Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
tues of muck, generations of farmers, without realising what they were doing, improved the
condition of English farmland by applying green manures.
This is a point of view that lends considerable historical support to the case for stockfree
agriculture. Allen is suggesting that the agricultural revolution, insofar as it was dependent
upon nitrogen fixation, could have been carried out just as successfully, in the long run, by
using legumes as a green manure rather than as animal feed. In the light of recent research
into stockfree organic rotations entirely reliant upon green manures, it looks as though this
could be correct.
The Geography of Muck
Unfortunately no sooner had one problem been solved by the so called agricultural re-
volution, than another was caused by the industrial revolution. As land was progressively
enclosed for 'improvement' by capitalist farmers like Coke (even though many of the im-
provements just described took place some 200 years earlier on open fields) peasants were
squeezed out of their communities and impelled into towns, in a process similar to one now
taking place on a far larger scale in developing countries. The distance separating the rising
population of townspeople from the countryside where their food was grown made it in-
creasingly difficult to return many important nutrients - including those found in human
dung, food waste, horse manure and urban pig and cow manure - back to the land whence
they came. It was not impossible to truck or ship or channel them back to the countryside,
and sometimes they were; but the financial (and aesthetic) incentive to gather the fruits of
the soil and cart them into towns was far greater than the incentive to gather the contents
of urban middens and return them to the land. Increasingly they were dumped into rivers
or the sea, and the invention of flush toilets and the development of waterborne sewage
sytems facilitated the process.
The matter was observed by two people in particular, who offered very different solu-
tions. In
Das Kapital
, Marx observed:
Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing
minimum, and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population, crammed to-
gether in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable
rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, metabolism prescribed by the
natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil,
which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.
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Despite Marx's choice of the word 'irreparable',
The Communist Manifesto
advocated
the 'combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the
distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over
