THE GOLDEN HOOF AND GREEN MANURE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 95

even a short distance is expensive (except in the case of municipal compost, because it is
subsidised to the tune of between two and five times its value). 30 This is precisely the ad-
vantage of animals in cultures which have no access to fossil fuels or municipal subsidies:
they mop up nutrients from distant pastures and sparse hillsides and deposit them on arable
land, with relatively little human energy expenditure. Without stock or cheap fossil fuel,
the most convenient way to provide green manure for vegan production is to grow areas
of clover, or similar legumes, on part of the area cultivated and disc them in on a rotating
basis - effectively a fallow, but a more productive one than would have been possible in
the days before the introduction of legumes. A 'stockless rotation' of the kind carried out
by Elm Farm, precisely because it is a rotation, has to occur on arable land.
The question here - since we are exploring the relative efficiency of vegan and animal
agriculture - is how much extra land is required for this green manure. The unhelpful an-
swer, seems to be anything from as much again to none at all. The panels below give a
number of examples, not all of them successful.
STOCKLESS ROTATIONS
1:1 Trout Run, PA: Vegetable farm with short growing season, with 50 per cent under two consecutive
crops of clover and vetch green manure. 1
1:1 Eliot Coleman states that he requires an acre of hay to make sufficient compost to fertilize an acre
of food crops. 2
2:1 Oxbrow cites a stockless system in Norfolk in the 1920s and 1930s where two acres of wheat were
grown in rotation with one acre of beans grown as green manure. 3
2:1 Ballbrado, Ireland: This farm started in 1990 with a stockless rotation at 3:1, but abandoned it, and
now does organic grain and beef. The farmer, Richard Auler, commented: 'A stockless organic farm is a
dead end, don't even try it. The most important asset on this farm is the suckler herd.' 4
2:1 Snider Farm, Alberta: Legume and cereal green manure, rye, spring oats and peas intercropped,
legume and cereal green manure, wheat, peas and barley intercropped. 5
2:1 Iain Tolhurst, a successful and well known UK grower, is variously reported as having had 35 per
cent and 30 per cent of his field crop land out of production at any one time. 6 He also uses undersown cover
crops. On his intensive vegetable plots, he adds 30 tonnes per acre of compost per year; this suggests the use
of considerably more than an acre's worth of compost. 7
4:2 Denmark: K Thorup Kristensen: six course rotation with five years vegetables and barley, and one
year clover and undersown cover crops. 8 However a year of peas provided a low return, and the entire crop
was ploughed in so it can really only be viewed as a 2:1 ratio. Successfully operated for eight years, but
funding withdrawn.
5:2 Co-operative Wholesale Society: Seven year rotation of wheat, oats and beans with two years of
red clover. Had higher yields of wheat than a parallel manure based system, but returns on other crops not
available. Phosphorus added to both systems. Mycorrhizal activity higher in manured plots. 9