Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
or chickens, they would provide more manure - but not enough to grow the corn necessary
to feed them.
The organic livestock model is worrying because it is very expensive on land. It would
require ploughing up 1.76 million hectares of our existing pasture land to provide cropland
and leys. This in turn means that there is not quite enough permanent pasture left for the
beef - there is a shortage of 149,000 hectares, which has to be taken out of the rough graz-
ing. Only 2.623 million hectares are left for other uses such as wildlife parks or biomass
production.
There are two main reasons for the heavy land requirement of organic farming. The first
is that average yields of organic wheat and potatoes are only 60 per cent of those achieved
with the use of chemicals. With most other crops the difference between organic and chem-
ical is less pronounced, but wheat and potatoes are the staples. The other problem is the
cows, particularly the beef cows which take up an enormous amount of land for very little
return. There appears to be too much beef, which is strange because it is the same amount
per person as in Mellanby's 1975 scenario, and it didn't cause any problem then. Admit-
tedly there are now seven million more mouths to feed, and also Mellanby puts fertilizer on
his leys. But even so the beef sector seems to have expanded disproportionately. In 1975
the beef herd occupied the same amount of land as the dairy herd; but now the area devoted
to beef (including grain for cattle feed) is almost twice as large.
Here, paradoxically, it is high yields that are causing the problem. The figures in Table E
are derived from the
Organic Farm Management Handbook
2007, and they reflect a more
modern management approach in an era of cheap subsidised corn. Whereas Mellanby's
cows yielded just 3,600 litres of milk a year, organic cows today average 5,800 litres, only
1,200 litres less than non-organic cows. The trouble is that to achieve this they need fairly
large amounts of grain - over a tonne a year each - whereas Mellanby's cows are grass-fed.
TABLE F: LIVE STOCK PERMACULTURE
Including pigs, poultry, textiles, tractor or horse power and timber
• 7.9 million hectares arable and ley
• 5.9 million hectares of pasture
• 6 million hectares of woodland
• 2.4 million spare hectares
Population 60.6 million. Total agriculture and forestry land 22.205 million ha.
