Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Europe, whereas bullrush tubers were a non-starter. Both were accessible plants that ab-
sorbed a generous amount of sunlight because they were in areas too wet for trees to grow,
or on the edge of the forest canopy. As clearings expanded it's easy to see how bullrushes,
reliant upon copious quantities of water, were outcompeted by wheat, barley and rye, whilst
hazel hung on at the margins.
Why have arboreal incomers such as chestnut and walnut failed to establish themselves
as successfully in Britain as wheat, barley, oats and rye? No doubt for the same reasons
that they have failed to compete with cereals in most areas of southern Europe, namely that
trees devote a significant part of their energy to creating infrastructure that makes the end
product, the seed, difficult to harvest. To my knowledge, walnuts have never been a staple
in western Europe, whereas chestnuts have, but only in mountainous areas that couldn't
grow decent crops of cereals, or indeed walnuts. That is where chestnuts, the potato of the
nut community, found their niche.
In the 21st century, several thousand years after the arrival of agriculture in the British
Isles, the imperative is no longer to open up new areas to sunlight in order to generate
prolific and accessible seed production, because we have cracked that with cereals. Now
we need to sequester carbon in the natural environment, and to find ways of providing the
concentrated nutrients that most of us crave, without overindulging in the extravagance of
meat. Well-endowed nuts such as walnuts and hazelnuts look as though they might foot
the bill, though there is some doubt whether chestnuts fall into that category. The ability
to grow nuts in Britain as prolifically as they grow south of the Loire, and to substitute
them for our grain fed meat production, would fix carbon and enhance the biodiversity of
our landscape. For the consumer, it would increase the variety in the homegrown diet, and
make the progression towards a default level of livestock more appetizing.
This doesn't mean that livestock are incompatible with nuts, though they are incidental,
and they can be complementary. Like fruit orchards, nut plantations take time to establish,
have to be kept clean and have to be supplied with the necessary nutrients. As is the case
with orchards, these objectives can be achieved through the use of chemicals, or of ma-
chinery, or as was traditionally the case, through grazing and livestock management. A high
yield of walnuts and hazelnuts suggests the need for high levels of fertility - what goes
out must come in. Crawford states that he operates on the basis that 'about 30 per cent of
the cropping area of an agricultural system needs to be devoted to other fertility-building
plants to remain sustainable'. In this respect, his nut plantations are like any other kind of
intensive organic grain cultivation - they need to be supplemented with an area of green
nitrogen-fixing manure which may or may not be circulated through livestock, according
to the preference of the farmer.
Tree Fetishism
