Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
windrows, turned, turned again, and then again, and then packed in plastic bags, delivered
to retail centres and sold to people who drive it home and put it back in the very gardens
where the raw material first came from. I have been unable to find a life cycle analysis for
the entire process, but the shredding and turning alone requires 29 kilowatt hours of elec-
tricity per tonne - or 167 kilowatt hours for compost made from a mixture including food
activity 'on the hoof'.
The automobility of animals also means that livestock farming is less dependent upon
machinery than arable farming. The fact that vegetables can't move is often a disadvantage:
everything has to be done for them (though on the other hand, they do not try to escape).
Crops of cabbages cannot make their way to the waterhole in dry weather, or pick them-
selves up and find their way to the packing shed at the farmer's call like cows to the milking
parlour. Cabbages have to be carried to market, while livestock can be driven to market on
the hoof, and in low carbon local economies around the world, they still are. Very large
herds of animals can be, and in some places still are, managed without any form of ma-
chinery whatsoever - whereas over a certain scale most arable farmers rely on tractors or
animal traction. When things go wrong a livestock farmer will likely have his arm up a
cow's backside, while an arable farmer will have his head underneath his tractor.
Muscle or Machine?
A Turner prize-winner called Mark Wallinger has designed a 50 metre high white horse
to be erected near the Thames estuary, along with 10,000 new homes, shops, offices and
an international railway station. While the public are no doubt relieved that a traditional
subject for public works has been preferred to the alternative, a 'stack of five open cubes
featuring a laser light, by Daniel Buren', the fact that the horse 'will be a faithfully accurate
representation of a throroughbred' means that it will be a misrepresentation of the tradi-
tional British horse - equivalent to erecting a statue of a giant Ferrari in Cowley.
In the census of horses conducted by the Board of Trade in 1920, there were 19,743 thor-
oughbreds in Britain, out of a total of 2,192,165 horses. More than two thirds of all these
were draught horses of which 774, 934 were in active agricultural work, ploughing the bulk
of the 4.5 million hectares under cultivation (about the same area as today). By 1939, the
number of horses on British farms had declined to less than a million, and during the 1950s
virtually all of them disappeared, displaced, some say, not so much by tractors as by tractors
with front-loaders. Those of us brought up in the 1950s are the last to remember working
Shires, horse-drawn coalmen and rag-and-bone men, not to mention details like the hessian
feed bags attached round the muzzles of horses during lunch break so that nothing spilled
onto the clean suburban streets.
