ANIMAL FURLONGS AND VEGETABLE MILES - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 174

accepted horse-per-hectare ratio was around one pair per ten hectare, with that number in-
creasing by one horse per each ten hectare increment in farm size. If the average farm unit
is 40ha it therefore needs five horses,' - which is 16 hectares per pair. 16 It looks as though,
theoretically speaking, it requires the equivalent of one hectare of good quality agricultural
land to provide the horse power to cultivate 10 hectares. This figure is confirmed by Jansen
who calculates that his Swedish village, were it entirely horse-powered today, would need
to devote 10.2 per cent of its arable land to feeding its horse, plus another 0.8 for the energy
necessary to manufacture the equipment. 17
How does this compare with biofuels? This is even trickier to determine, not from a
paucity of information, but because there are so many different kinds of biofuel, and so
many different analyses of their potential performance. A hectare of land, producing about
eight tonnes of grain, according to figures from what was then called the Department of
Trade and Industry, which are the most optimistic I can find, will produce bioethanol equi-
valent to 1,000 litres of diesel. 18 It takes about 100 litres of fuel to cultivate a hectare of
wheat, 19 and if we allow another ten litres for the embodied energy cost of the machinery 20
that means a hectare of bioethanol could power a tractor to cultivate that one hectare and a
further 9 hectares. 21
There is therefore a broad equivalence between the energy performance of a draught
horse, and the energy performance of a tractor running on bioethanol from wheat. Circum-
stantial factors and mitigating circumstances could be argued on both sides. Horse advoc-
ates could point out that nearly all studies view bioethanol processing to be even less ef-
ficient than the DTI figure I have used, 22 while biofuel advocates might point to studies
showing that if the wheat straw were used to provide heat, or distillers grains' anaerobic-
ally digested, then the process would be more efficient. 23 Horse advocates might argue that
the cultivations necessary to grow ten hectares of grain shouldn't take a pair of horses more
than 100 days, leaving another 160 days (plus two rest days a week) on which the horses
can do moderately heavy work at no extra fuel cost - whereas any additional work per-
formed by the tractor would require extra fuel. 24 Tractor advocates may riposte (illogically
in this context) that you don't have to feed a tractor when it's in the shed.
And so it can go on with, I suspect, the balance in favour of horse cultivation at the mo-
ment, simply because it is an existing and proven technology, whereas on-farm biofuel is
not. However, vastly more investment and research is being directed into biofuels than into
animal technologies, and it is anticipated that within the next few years a 'second gener-
ation' of biofuels will outstrip the performance of existing methods. Whereas current bio-
fuels are generated inefficiently from high value crops such as wheat, corn, rape oil and
(less inefficiently) sugar cane, the second generation will focus on converting cellulose
from fibrous crops such as switch grass and Miscanthus , which can be grown on lower