Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
also has something to do with their cow horn preparations and planting by the moon. There
is nothing to be lost by encouraging mavericks to experiment with ways in which nature
can store carbon whilst releasing in greater abundance the nutrients that we need.
Credits for the Credulous?
While experiments in carbon farming are to be welcomed, I am sceptical about the wis-
dom of extending this welcome to schemes for selling carbon credits. There is no guarantee
that these are any less likely to attract con artists and sellers of indulgences than the other
carbon offset schemes which have surfaced in the last ten years - indeed judging by the
Carbon Farmers of America, they are already on the case. Soil carbon credits are handi-
capped by a number of difficulties, not least the huge expense of monitoring various dif-
ferent types of carbon down to a depth of at least a metre. But there is another flaw in all
the schemes mentioned at the beginning of the chapter: farmers are paid for the amount of
carbon they sequester in their soil; but logically they ought to be paid for the amount of
carbon they extract from the atmosphere - and that is by no means the same thing.
To illustrate this, take Polyface Farm, which features in both Michael Pollan's and Gra-
ham Harvey's books as an example of a well run and highly productive grass farm - which
indeed it is. Polyface produces annually 'twenty tons of beef, fifteen tons of pork, ten
thousand chickens, twelve hundred turkeys, a thousand rabbits and four hundred thousand
lan who comments: 'This seemed to me a truly astonishing amount of food from 100 acres
of grass'.
And so it would be, if it all did come from 100 acres of grass; but as any farmer can tell
at a glance, it is not just astonishing, it is impossible. I wrote to Joel Salatin asking him
what his feed inputs were and he was kind enough to reply that the beef were completely
fed on grass, the broilers got about 15 per cent of their feed from pasture, the egg-layers a
little more and the pigs about 25 per cent, though in a good mast season they can get nearly
100 per cent of their feed from acorns. As one would expect, a sizable proportion of the
feed comes from other farms.
67
With these feed imports comes fertility, to compensate for the fertility that goes out with
all the meat that is sold. The carbon and the nitrogen in the feed is fed to the chickens who
follow behind the cows, and who deposit it on the ground in the form of manure; some of
the carbon may be directly absorbed as organic while the nitrogen enhances grass growth
and photosynthesis, which also contributes to soil carbon. Of all the carbon added to Sal-
atin's pastures over the years, some will have come directly from the atmosphere; but a
proportion will have come, directly or indirectly, from another farm in the form of soya,
corn or whatever feed Salatin buys in.
