Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Now, so much of these downs are plowed up, as has increased the quantity of corn
produced in this county, in a prodigious manner, and lessened their quantity of wool;
all which has been done by folding their sheep upon the plow'd lands, removing the
fold every night to a fresh place, 'till the whole piece of ground has been folded upon;
this and this alone, has made these lands, which in themselves are poor, and where in
some places, the earth is not above six inches above the solid chalk rock, able to bear
as good wheat, as any of the richer lands in the vales, though not quite so much: many
of these lands lie so remote from the farmers' houses, and up such high hills, that it
would not be worth their while to carry dung from those farmhouses, to those remote
lands.
4
In the 1970s, I worked on sheep farms in the South of France where the flock was grazed
during the day on mountain terrain, a good deal rougher, higher and more remote than the
hills of Wiltshire, and folded under cover in the
bergerie
at night. The sheep trampled their
droppings into a fine golden powder, which for much of the year stayed bone dry, so there
was no point in mixing straw with it. This was treasured by vine farmers who could broad-
cast the manure by hand from a sack as easily as if it were a chemical fertilizer, and who
paid a very handsome price for it.
Animals not only perform the work of transporting nutrients, they also digest and process
them. Ruminants, in a matter of hours, convert unpromising fibrous biomass into a bio-
active fertilizer and compost catalyst (and in the case of cows a useful building material
measure, and trample it into the straw with their hooves. A flock of sheep or a herd of cows
in a well-designed farming system is the most energy-efficient compost-making machine
yet devised. It can carry out the functions of harvester, tractor and trailer, chipper/shredder,
bioactivator, and muck-spreader; and it usually does this for free, since its operating costs
are covered by the value of the meat or the milk. At Polyface Farm, an organic farm in
Virginia, pigs are used instead of a tractor frontloader to turn manure heaps. As the winter
bedding from the cows builds up, grain is thrown into it which, when pigs are let in, en-
courages them to root through it, turning and aerating it. The system also avoids the use of
a mechanical grain crusher, since the grain ferments and becomes digestible to the pigs.
6
It may be nutritionally more efficient to make compost directly from dispersed vegetable
matter without the aid of animals, but it's hard work, which these days is usually performed
by petrol driven machinery when it is done on any scale. The nearest modern equivalent
to a herd grazing the commons is perhaps the subsidized municipal compost made from
tree cuttings, lawn and hedge clippings and garden waste. The material is strimmed, flailed
or mown, stuffed (or in the case of fallen leaves, blown) into bags, driven to the tip in a
multitude of cars and vans, transferred to another site, chipped and shredded, piled into
