Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
ded to underestimate this. Seen from the conventional farmers' point of view, it simply
meant a larger amount of land that was not suitable for farming that must, with the
abandonment of meat eating, be taken out of production. I must say that here my sym-
pathies lie with the vegetarians.
1
Despite the power of this argument, thirty years on it is hard to find any vision of what a
vegan countryside would look like, in the UK or anywhere else. There is nothing to this ef-
fect on the Vegan Society's website, the sections on 'land' being devoted solely to explain-
ing how livestock is connected to existing problems. Other vegan sources tell us that vegan
farmers 'can harvest more per plot and thus spare some of today's cropland for nature', but
subject in
The Land
, Jenny Hall volunteered that a vegan and organic Britain might have
7.2 million hectares of arable land, one million of fruits and berries, ten million of managed
woodland, one million of managed wildlife conservation, and 2.8 million of 'wildland'.
3
That gives us an abstract grid, but it leaves the reader to to paint in the details. Will there
be hedgerows in this liberated vegan countryside? Will there be grass? Will there be pred-
ators? Will there be rats?
After reading every tract in my possession and skimming through vegan websites, I
tumbled upon this, from Paul Appleby, which is sensible enough to be worth quoting at
some length:
Opponents of vegetarianism often predict dire consequences for our countryside
'if everyone went vegetarian' or, even more calamitously, 'if everyone went vegan'.
Such prognostications ignore the fact that the UK is not, alas, going to turn vegetarian,
let alone vegan, overnight, and consequently that any changes to the landscape will be
gradual, reflecting a decreasing dependence on food from animals. They also suppose
the landscape is sacrosanct, and that any widespread change in diet or lifestyle that
threatens the status quo should be viewed with suspicion, if not totally opposed …
The British landscape has been shaped by human hands ever since Bronze Age man
began clearing native deciduous woodland for timber and farming several thousand
years ago … Had we inherited Lakeland as it was before its settlement by pastoral
and agricultural people some 5,500 years ago, it would be a land of unpolluted lakes,
teeming with fish and rich in waterfowl. The lake margins and valley flats would be
covered by extensive tracts of fen woodland. Alder woods would flank the wild rivers.
Ospreys would breed in trees around the shores. Forests, dominated by oak, would
mount the valley sides.
