Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
9
C
AN
B
RITAIN
F
EED
I
TSELF
?
It is generally agreed that the day of cheap food is at an end.
Kenneth Mellanby 1975
I
n 1975, the Scottish ecologist Kenneth Mellanby wrote a short book called
Can Britain
was simple, almost a back of the envelope job, but it provides a useful template for making
similar calculations. In this chapter I have adapted and embellished Mellanby's 'basic diet'
to show how much land modern UK agriculture might require to produce the food we need
under six different agricultural regimes - chemical, organic, and permacultural, each with or
without livestock.
There were two main reasons why I decided to repeat Mellanby's analysis. Firstly, al-
though food is now even cheaper than it was when Mellanby so confidently predicted a rise
in price, it is nonetheless possible that the UK may one day have to become more self re-
liant than it is now. Secondly, I am interested to see how organic agriculture in particular
performs, because the most convincing argument advanced against organic farming by its
opponents is that it takes up too much land. This is of most concern in poor, highly popu-
lated countries such as Bangladesh, but Britain cannot afford to be complacent: it is more
densely populated than China, Pakistan, Vietnam or any African country except Rwanda.
There are limitations in this kind of statistical exercise; and I do not claim to have carried
it out with either the expertise or the thoroughness that it merits. This is, at best, a back of an
A4 envelope job. The results should not be seen as anything other than a rough guide, and a
useful framework for thinking about such matters.
2
Mellanby's Basic Diet
Mellanby took as his starting point the UK's total figure for grain production. In 1975,
Britain grew 15 million tonnes of cereals on less than 3.6 million hectares at a yield of about
four tonnes per hectare. This was the equivalent of 283 kilos per person a year, which is
