Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
land and the arrival of set-aside. The amount of land under permanent pasture and forestry
has increased correspondingly.
Table 4
Table B is Mellanby's 1975 table updated to 2005, to take account of the rise in popu-
lation and increases in crop yield. The same diet for 14 per cent more people can now be
provided on 86 per cent of the 1975 arable land area. However, beef production nowadays
is less efficient than in the 1975 model. There is a reason for this, which I shall explain later
on.
I have made one addition to Mellanby's table: some extra hectares to account for ve-
getables and fruit, which require more land than corn does to produce a given number of
calories. About 160,000 hectares are devoted to horticulture in the UK at the moment, but
we import about 60 per cent of all our fruit and veg, so we consume over 400,000 hectares
worth. This is a substantial amount of land; but I can understand why Mellanby left it out,
because calculating the area involved and the number of calories for such a variety of dif-
ferent crops is tricky.
Mellanby Goes Vegan
Mellanby could feed his population quite comfortably by reducing the amount of meat,
so what would happen if it went vegan? In order to make a comparison with stockless ag-
riculture providing a non-animal diet, in Table C I have substituted the meat and milk in
Mellanby's ration with an equivalent ration of protein (peas) and fat (rape oil). The meat-
eaters get their fat from milk (about 24 grams per day) and meat, but both diets are stingy
on fat for anyone wanting to lead a physically active or an indulgent lifestyle.
Table C shows that chemical stockless agriculture is by far the most economical in terms
of land use and can grow the entire ration on less arable land than that required by chemical
