Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
• One hectare of arable plus 0.8 ha of pasture supplies 7.5 people
The need for grain is not the only problem caused by the high milk yield of these cows.
The size of Mellanby's beef herd was dictated by the number of calves that his low yield-
ing cows produced. But now, because there are fewer cows producing the same amount of
milk, there are fewer calves. This means that in order to produce the same amount of beef
as in Mellanby's diet, we have to run a dedicated beef suckler herd - nearly two million
cows which produce nothing except one beef calf a year, whereas Mellanby's calves were
all the by-product of cows supplying milk. This cancels out much of the advantage of high-
yielding cows and is the main reason why land occupied by beef has swelled from 2400
hectares in 1975 to 4100 in Table E.
I therefore decided to see what would happen if I reduced the beef herd to a size com-
mensurate with the dairy herd and moved back to Mellanby's system of running a larger
number of low yielding dairy cows which can subsist entirely on grass. This is akin to what
has been happening in New Zealand since they abolished farm subsidies, because it is more
competitive - which is why New Zealand butter is advertised as coming from free range
cows. And it is what I have done in Table F. If you examine just the cattle figures in it, you
will see that the milk yield has been reduced from 5,800 to 3,700 litres a cow, and the total
amount of beef produced has been reduced from 1.24 million tonnes to 735,000 tonnes;
but the number of dairy cows is increased so that the total amount of milk produced, 12.5
million tonnes, remains the same as in Table E.
TABLE G: VEGAN PERMACULTURE
Including extra veg, textiles, tractor power and timber
• 7.7 million hectares arable
• 6 million hectares arable
• 8.4 million spare hectares
