Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
In his diatribe against vegan agriculture, the late Mark Purdey (best known for identi-
fying a link between BSE and organophosphates) described how he started in agriculture
'under the great expanse of striated sky' of the fenlands, working 'thousands of bleak acres
of vegetables':
The farm workforce clearly felt estranged from what was once their indigenous
native landscape. These labourers resented the fact that a mono-arable/vegetable sys-
tem of farming had been installed two decades ago after a change in the land's own-
ership. This had left many of their former workmates jobless, whilst those remaining
felt divorced from any aspect of management or relationship with their work.
But I do remember admiring the stamina and reactionary insight of one fossilized,
peewit eyed character called Reg Strawson. He'd vent forth his daily parable on the
fate of this once-upon-a-time peaty, organic friable loam: 'See yon field now (being
the tip of one big 190 acre amalgamated field) 'twas where I pastured the milch cows
in former days. Now thee blessed bullocks have gone, the zoils' gone zour there. Stick
zoil in with a beet fortch and it clatts like do clay. In May it's droughted up, by June
its blowing over dyke yonder.'
I, too, rapidly found myself unable to form any working relationship with this tree-
less prairiescape of sterile inorganic moondust. Disillusioned, I left my friends on the
fens behind.
Upon arrival in the West Country, I quickly found my niche within the mixed,
small farming landscape. Livestock pumped the economic heartbeat that enabled these
smaller farms to survive. My first job was to muck out the yearlings' house and I re-
member experiencing an innate sense of wholeness the first time I watched a shower
of dung being flail-fountained out of the back of the muckspreader; fertile fodder.
All of the farms and their staff seemed vibrant with the ethereal relationship flowing
between the soil, the crops, the livestock and the landscape.
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Purdy clouds his antivegan message by comparing animal farming to a worst case scen-
ario of chemical arable agriculture. But much of what he says still stands. Under organic
stockfree management the soil might have been in better heart, but would Reg Strawson's
heart have been gladdened by a 190 acre field divided into strips of which one in three was
clover green manure?
The contrast we observe between the wide arable prairies typical of some parts of
Eastern England and the tree lined patchwork of the west is not the difference between or-
ganic and non-organic agriculture, but between modern arable farming and mixed livestock
and arable farming. The difference extends, not just to the lie of the landscape, but also to
the way humans relate to it. Most wheat, barley and potatoes are nowadays farmed without
