Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
This is not incompatible with timber production. All pulp and timber, when it comes to the
end of its economic life, is firewood.
This leaves three million hectares for wildlife: an eighth of the country, not as much as
some people would wish to see. This land, since it is specifically not woodland, would have
to be grazed by edible, semi-wild herbivores such as deer, primitive types of ox, or Konik
ponies.
The wild area could be increased by reducing the sheep flock still further, at the expense
of a small amount of meat and some rather valuable wool; by producing more 'pink veal'
(from young grass-fed cattle) and less mature beef; or by reducing the number of dairy
cows and the amount of milk consumed. In each case, to compensate, a smaller area of land
would have to be converted to crop production and green manure.
Vegan Permaculture
Table G outlines, as far as I am able, a vegan permacultural vision, based on the same
data. I have introduced more flax and hemp to make up for the lack of wool and leather;
and since the meat-eaters have been allowed pork and eggs, I have increased the variety in
the vegan diet by allocating an additional 100,000 hectares for fruit and vegetables, most of
which is grown on non-agricultural or orchard land, and fertilized with municipal compost.
Perhaps I should allow them more. Nuts are an obvious choice, but reliable information
about yields is difficult to find. The vegan system uses human sewage for fertilizer like the
livestock system, though there would be more of a problem avoiding applying it to human
edible crops.
The obvious, and some would say overwhelming advantage of the vegan system is that
it uses less land. However, it is the grazing land that the vegans economize on. They re-
quire almost as much arable land as the meat-eaters, mainly because of the lack of manure,
and the expense of providing fat or oil. In fact the area of land under annual cultivation in
the vegan system in any one year (7.2 million hectares) is considerably greater than in the
livestock system where more than a third of the arable land consists of grass leys, and only
4.6 million hectares hold annual crops.
The vegans could perhaps reduce the area of green manure by more efficient use of cover
crops, or by importing hay or leaf mould for mulch. There are also the residues from rape-
seed oil, biofuel, and products such as oat milk and pea milk which could be used as fertil-
izer - though vegans might be tempted to trade these with pig keepers.
The disadvantage of the vegan model, from the peasant perspective, is that it results in
a lop-sided land economy, with almost all the activity concentrated in the arable area; and
overall it appears to provide less employment on the land than the livestock system. The
less arable areas of Britain would become agriculturally redundant. All that empty space in
the grassland area gives the relatively small growing area a rather compacted urban feel,
