ANIMAL FURLONGS AND VEGETABLE MILES - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 172

Britain, being at the forefront of civilization, yielded to petrol hegemony quicker than
most nations. Western Europe has followed suit, but even in the 1980s you could still see,
for example, a leathery French peasant guiding his yoke of oxen every morning along a
certain stretch of the Route Nationale 9, not far from Rodez. I like to think they delayed
the construction of the Autoroute 9 until the poor fellow was dead and buried, and in a
broader sense they did. In Eastern European countries such as Poland and Romania, horse
cultivation is still common practice, though under attack from EU modernizers. In the USA
horse cultivation is flourishing in the boondocks, inspired by the commercial success of the
Amish communities, and aided by the fact that there is plenty of land to keep them on. 8 In
large parts of the Third World, animal traction remains the only economic choice for small
farmers.
It is at this stage in the evolution of farming technology that we are discovering that
fossil fuels are causing more problems than they solve, and we are faced with need to find
alternatives. 'There are three horses in the race to replace petroleum - biofuels, electricity
and hydrogen - and at various times you see the fortunes of these various horses ebb and
flow,' a motor industry expert called Roland Hwang was quoted as saying in the New York
Times . 9 But however true that may be of the automobile industry, it will be some time time
before we see electric or hydrogen-powered tractors rivalling the use of diesel on the farm.
The two main contenders are biofuels and the runner Hwang thought had been retired from
the race - namely the horse.
These two sources of on-farm renewable energy are not incompatible, and there is no
reason why they shouldn't be carried out equally satisfactorily on adjacent farms. However,
it is useful to compare their performance, and for vegans there is an interest in proving that
the non-animal solution is superior. The late Dave from Darlington wrote a stimulating art-
icle on the subject in an early edition of the vegan magazine Growing Green , but unfortu-
nately much of the information he had at his disposal for horses was so out of date that the
comparison is almost valueless. 10 I wrote a short paper on the subject in 2007, but that too
I find is flawed and out of date. 11 The main problem is that one is faced with a superabund-
ance of evolving data about the performance of biofuels, and a dearth of information about
the performance of horses.
Much of the casual commentary on horse use is coloured by allusions to the amount of
land they take up. We are variously told that when horses tilled all our land they required a
quarter or a third of it to feed them. Darlington suggests that 40 per cent of farmland is re-
quired to feed horses, but this is derived from a secondhand reference to a conference held
in 1973 in Alberta, where yields of crops per acre are extremely low. The most extreme
example of this approach comes from one of the Global Opponents of Organic Farming,
Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, who (citing Vaclav Smil) states: