ANIMAL FURLONGS AND VEGETABLE MILES - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 175

quality land. Protagonists claim that Miscanthus can 'produce about 2.5 times the amount
of ethanol we can produce per acre of corn'. 25 If that is the case then there is a high chance
that it will prove to be more efficient than animal power. Jansen examines a range of bio-
fuel options for his Swedish village, which require between 14 per cent and six per cent
of the arable land to produce the energy needed for manufacturing and powering the ma-
chinery. 26 The low figure of six per cent is achieved by using willow coppice rather than
rape oil to power the machinery. The fact that a horse emits about a fifth as much methane
as a dairy cow might also weigh against animal traction. 27
If the intrinsic efficiency of biofuel over animal power is confirmed, then it still remains
to be shown that the tapping of this energy does not require an infrastructure so energy
intensive that it defeats the object. A significant advantage of animal power is that it re-
quires only the animals themselves, a few steel tools that last for generations, and a bit of
leather - and animals reproduce of their own accord. In a study of horse-powered farming
systems, Chet Kendell found that on a thirty acre farm in Michigan, over a period of 40
years, a farmer derived a revenue of $21,000 from the sale of his horses' progeny, whereas
a fossil-fuel-powered farm of the same size, whose small tractor is traded in for a new one
every 10 years, would have incurred costs of $70,000. 28 On-farm processing of biofuels for
a tractor would require additional equipment, though the expense of this would be offset by
savings on fuel bills. Centralized generation involving the transport of biomass to power
stations, and the subsequent redistribution of the energy and other products back to into the
wider economy, however great the economies of scale, might have a hard time matching
the innate sustainability of on-farm biofuel systems which, like working animals, produce
and expend the energy on site.
The contest between animal power and biofuels is a fascinating and important one, but
it is bizarre how the cards are stacked. Animal traction is the dominant way of cultivat-
ing land throughout about half the world, while biofuels are barely used at all, except in
Brazil, and experimentally in countries like the USA and Germany. Yet hardly any main-
stream research is carried out into the comparative efficiency and sustainability of animal
traction, whereas virtually every university in the western world has a faculty investigating
the potential of biofuels. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of academic papers compar-
ing different kinds of biofuels, but, aside from Jansen's study, I have yet to find a single
one analysing the efficiency of animal power, which, after firewood, is the most frequently
used bio-energy in the modern world. In such a prejudiced climate it seems inevitable that
biofuels will emerge the winner.
The late Charlie Pinney, who for many years was a rare voice in the UK propagating the
benefits of horse drawn cultivation, observed: