Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
about 2700 calories a day - comfortable enough for every man, woman, child and elderly
person in the country. The total population was 53 million.
Working from this figure of 15 million tonnes of grain, Mellanby built up a somewhat
more varied diet, subtracting grain from the total as he introduced other foodstuffs. Table A
shows us his 'basic rations' of cereal, potatoes, sugar, milk and meat. Every person gets the
equivalent of a pint of milk and a pound of potatoes a day, which is what they were actually
consuming in 1975: but Mellanby gives them less meat.
The 2400 hectares assigned for dairy are mainly leys - temporary pastures which are ro-
tated with cropland to provide fertility. Another 2400 hectares of permanent grazing are for
raising beef. As for sheep, Mellanby retains the 28 million of them that there were in 1975,
without bothering to work out how much land they take up or how much meat or calories
they provide - in fact they do not contribute much more than one per cent of the total diet.
The three items most obviously missing from Mellanby's basic diet are beer, fat and ve-
getables. Beer, since it is made of barley and has a calorific value of 100 to 150 calories a
pint, is included within the grain figure. Fat is a more serious omission, involving substan-
tial amounts of land, and Mellanby could usefully have included it in his calculations. He
may have been deterred by the fact that edible rape oil had barely been invented in 1975,
so his self-sufficient Britain would have been dependent for its fat supply on lard. As for
vegetables and fruit, Mellanby is content simply to point out that these can be provided in
allotments and gardens.
These omissions don't undermine his main point, since there are millions of hectares
left over, which could be put over to pigs, more cows (for butter), vegetables, poultry or
whatever anybody felt like. There is, in fact, no shortage of land whatsoever.
Mellanby's calculations are for so-called 'conventional' agriculture using nitrogen fer-
tilizers and other chemicals, which makes his task much easier; but he does mention the
potential of organic agriculture and concludes that, although less productive than conven-
tional agriculture, it could still probably feed the country using an extra 33 per cent of the
land.
The Mellanby Diet Today
Since 1975 a number of factors have changed: the population has risen from 53 million
people to 60.6 million, but crop yields have risen much faster. In 2004 Britain grew nearly
22 million tonnes of grains on 3.1 million hectares at a yield averaging over seven tonnes
per acre.
Table 4 shows how, as a result, land use has changed in the last 30 years. The total ag-
ricultural area has declined only slightly, but there has been a large shift away from tem-
porary grass ley, refiecting the decline of the dairy herd, as well as a smaller drop in arable
