Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ents half the total nitrogen available from the population's excrement - and twice the amount per person that Wessex
Water is currently obtaining from 2.5 million customers. This may be optimistic.
Forestry figures from Forestry Commissions Statistics,
http://www.forestry.gov.uk/statistics
;
and E Agate (2003)
Woodlands: A Practical Handbook
, BTCV.
The performance of grass-only organic dairy cows in Table F, after discussion with farmers and agronomists, I
have assessed at 3700 kilos, allowing 500 kilos for the calf. Stocking rate is one productive cow to the hectare, with each
replacement also requiring a hectare. This is generous compared to Mellanby's cows which produce 3.666 kilos of milk
each from chemically fertilized grassland at an average rate of 1.8 cows-plus-followers per hectare.
The biofuel and horse acreage is based on a figure of 15 per cent of arable land, derived from the studies and mod-
els in Jansén, J (2000),
Agriculture, Energy and Sustainability: Case Studies of a Loval Farming Community in Sweden
,
Swedish University of Agricultural Science, Uppsala.
The figures in Table H are derived from Centre for Alternative Technology, 2007,
Zero Carbon Britain
, CAT, with
some data (e.g. yield of sheep) harmonized with Tables F and G.
3
The figures for 2009 show a 0.5 tonne increase in the organic yield of winter wheat over 2007, to 4.8 tonnes milled.
Mark Measures, one of the authors of the
Organic Farm Management Handbook
, tells me that not too much store should
be set by this rise, which represents the better farms. A farm he knows on chalk downland would be content to get four
tonnes gross (3.8 tonnes milled). Pers com 2 December 2009.
4
Cf. Chapter 6, reference 18.
5
The ideas expressed in Mark Fisher's website
www.self-willed-land.org.uk
are highly compatible with a vegan land
economy. Jenny Hall wrote an article outlining a vision of a stockfree rural economy in Britain, in response to the public-
ation of 'Can Britain Feed Itself?', Hall, J (2008), 'Stockfree Britain',
The Land
5, Summer 2008.
6
I have had to guess how the specified amount of milk would be produced, being given little option but to place
it in the rough grazing (which would be both unproductive and inconvenient). However the CAT strategy only requires
20 million hectares because its designers consider that 2 million hectares of agricultural land are needed for 'roads and
buildings'. This is a massive overesti-mate: the entire area of non-agricultural development land in the UK, including the
whole of London and all our towns, cities and villages only comes to around 2.5 million hectare, while the category of
'other farmland' which includes buildings, ponds, tracks, farm woodland etc is 872,000 hectares.
