Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ploughed; pigs were fed on the whey that resulted from the peculiarly European method of
making hard cheeses to keep through the cold winters when there was little milk. Towards
the end of the Middle Ages when populations began to outstrip carrying capacity, there
were signs of destructive competition between different elements of this mixed farming
system. The shortfall in food production was exacerbated by a gradual deterioration in the
fertility of the arable land, due to an insufficiency of nitrogen. Ploughing up more land was
no remedy, since it decreased the amount of pasture available to provide manure.
Population pressure was relieved by the Black Death in 1350, which meant that much of
the exhausted cornland could be turned back to pasture. As the population grew back to its
former levels, one solution to population pressure was found in new crops of beans, turnips
and nitrogen-bearing fodder varieties such as clover and sainfoin, which enabled more an-
imals to be kept over winter, without diminishing the area devoted to corn. The other was
the colonization of the New World which opened up new lands for emigrants who grew
food and fibre to send back to the home country. European farming was to undergo further
ups and downs, more the consequence of capitalist opportunism than of ecological con-
straints. But in the interim more momentous events were taking place overseas. The cattle
nomads whose westward drift had been held up for 1000 years on the Atlantic seaboard,
were on the move again.
As we have seen, the Pleistocene extinctions had been more ruthlessly carried out in the
Americas than in Eurasia. Virtually every large mammal that was potentially domesticable
had been made extinct, and after the disappearance of the bridge of land across the Bering
Straits there was no means of getting them back. In the Andes the llama and alpaca were
domesticated by the Incas. In North America, if it was possible to domesticate the bison
without the aid of the horse, native Indians had shown little interest in trying. As far as
domestic animals were concerned, the New World presented itself as a tabula rasa to the
European colonialists, upon which they could stamp whatever sort of animal economy they
saw fit.
Jeremy Rifkin, in his flamboyant polemic against the cattle industry, Beyond Beef , ex-
pounds what might be called the 'bovine prerogative' theory of American history. The
manifest destiny of the pioneers, he suggests, was the proliferation of an atavistic cattle
culture whose roots lay in the rituals of the 'neolithic cowboys' who had migrated across
the Steppes, in the 'Mithraic blood sacrifices' of ancient Rome, and in the Celtic 'warrior
bull cult' (not, I might add, to be confused with 'the boar cults of the Celts, which identify
fearsome warriors as boars with giant tusks'. 5 Rifkin writes:
Centuries before Melville's Captain Ahab battled with the great white whale,
Spanish matadors were already apprenticing for man's new role on the world scene,
facing down the 'forces of nature' in dusty arenas in scores of small village towns on
the Iberian Peninsula. Spanish explorers transported the ancient Iberian cattle com-
 
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