Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Thankfully vegans, especially those who get their hands dirty, are not so fastidious
about manure and have a more rational approach to the matter. Many vegan farmers are as
opposed to the use of chemical fertilizers as organic livestock farmers - so they have to
find other ways of providing the nutrients supplied by manure. Instead of passing legumes,
grass or other feeds circuitously through the stomachs of animals, it is more efficient, they
argue, to apply them directly as mulch or green manure:
Veganic farmers do not deny that animal faeces and slaughterhouse residues will
indeed fertilize the soil and yield fine crops. However the fertility does not originate
with these residues, but rather with the grass and other plants which the animals eat.
The animal destroys the greatest part of that food energy by its digestion, metabolism
and other life processes. Even by the most scrupulous husbanding, only a small por-
tion of that life-force is stored in the animal or passed with its manure … Since plants
are the initial converters of solar energy, they should be our first choice for manurial
materials.
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Logic - at least reductionist logic - would appear to be on the side of the vegans. There
are indeed inefficiencies in passing nutrients through an animal, though in respect of nitro-
gen, these do not comprise 'the greatest part': an adult beef cow excretes over 90 per cent
which do not end up as meat, milk or manure are not so much destroyed as converted into
something else which may or may not be useful, a matter I shall consider in Chapter 12.
Over the last two decades there have been experiments in stockless rotations of organic
cereal crops and a rise in the number of stockfree farmers and growers. Experimental re-
search at Elm Farm Research Station and elsewhere suggests that 'all-arable organic farm-
ing is economically viable and technically feasible' and that yields can be maintained, at
less methods, among the most well known being Iain Tolhurst in the UK and Eliot Coleman
in the US. The vegans are right to insist that animals are not an essential element in the
organic fertility cycle.
However, the plant nutrients, just like those which have been passed through the gut of
an animal, still have to come from somewhere, and so stockless organic agriculture usu-
ally requires a larger land base than the area of land used for cultivation. If the imported
nutrients come from land which could not be cultivated - for instance hay from poor pas-
ture or leaf mould from woodland, or more commonly nowadays, municipal compost -
then that would not add to the area of arable land required to produce a stockless crop. But
high quality arable land often comes all in one lump, rather than in arable strips conveni-
ently interspersed with patches of poor land, and gathering and transporting these nutrients
