Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
threatened, because trees provide other vital services, such as protecting water resources,
preventing erosion, sequestering carbon, and mediating climate.
To redress this there are a number of courses humans can adopt. One is to stop the mostly
wasteful procedure of growing grass seed to feed to herbivores who have evolved to eat
fibre and to omnivores such as pigs who can survive on waste - a matter already discussed.
A more extreme possibility is the vegan project of eliminating livestock altogether to create
a system where the complexity of herbivores eating fibre is sacrificed in order to focus on
ultra-efficient seed production. This would result in a drastic reduction of grassland and a
huge increase in tree cover.
A third course of action, so far hardly mentioned in this topic, is to enhance the edibility
of trees, in order to bring them into the food economy. There is not much to be gained by
harvesting them for animal fodder therefore any enhancement must be for seed.
Nuts
Nuts are to trees what grains of wheat or rice are to grass - the part which provides
humans with essential nutrients. The rest of a tree is either edible only to animals, or ined-
ible to everything. Some trees produce fruit, but in temperate climates fruit - healthy and
full of vitamins though it may be - contains little protein, fat or energy, apart from sugar.
Any proposal to replace grassland with trees, has an interest in demonstrating that as much
nutrition can be derived from nuts as from grazing animals, if not more.
In the UK, the vegan case for expanding tree and nut production has been put forward
by the Movement for Compassionate Living, pioneered by the late Kathleen Jannaway. Un-
fortunately their arguments have not been well substantiated; even a reviewer in the Vegan
growers' magazine
Vohan News
took them to task because 'nowhere are we given a con-
vincing argument that people in temperate zones could feed satisfactorily from trees'. Jan-
naway responded, reasonably enough: 'I do not claim that people in temperate zones could
feed satisfactorily from trees alone, only that they could use them as a main source instead
of animal products'.
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The permaculturist Patrick Whitefield, on the other hand, is keen to see nuts developed
as a staple crop, an alternative for wheat and oats:
Whether nuts are a practical proposition as a staple food in this country has to be
an open question at this stage, though I am personally convinced that they will prove
to be so. Much depends upon answering these questions:
• How much food can they yield?
• What's the quality of that food?
• How easily can we grow them?
