THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 295

grass. 24 He is aware of the value of livestock as a means of providing nutrients and mov-
ing them around the farm. 25 And although, like many people, he accepts what I argue is an
exaggerated account of the inefficiency of livestock production, he is neither a vegan nor a
vegetarian.
It is not the main body of White field's book that I have difficulty with, but the headlines,
and therefore the emphasis. The titles of his five chapters on land use give an indication
of a slant: 'Gardens', 'Fruit, Nuts and Poultry', 'Farms and Food Links', 'Woodland' and
'Biodiversity'. Animals (with the exception of poultry), arable crops and grassland are all
lumped in under 'Farms and Food Links', and animals are allocated six pages to them-
selves, compared to nine pages for nuts and 42 pages for woodland.
Particularly noticeable is the scant attention paid to grass. It's not that Whitefield doesn't
have sensible things to say about grass - he does. But he doesn't say very much, when
you consider how much grass there is in Britain, how well it grows, and that grass is the
most likely ecosystem that permaculture pioneers, when they buy a bit of land, are going
to have to deal with. It is also usually the vegetation they know least about - 'of all things
most common, grasses are the least known.' 26 The word 'grass' doesn't appear in the in-
dex, nor do the words 'meadow', 'pasture' and 'hay'. By contrast, 'trees' have 22 entries,
and 'woodland' has 51 entries. 'Squirrels' have three entries, whereas cattle have only two.
Partly this is inadequate indexing: there are two pages entitled 'Grassland with Trees',
and meadows and pasture pop up elsewhere in the topic. There is a thoughtful assessment
of foggage, the wintering of cattle and sheep outside on grass. But I couldn't find anything
at all on making hay, even though it is by far the most biodiverse crop that any British
farmer is ever likely to harvest at one go. Grassland is dealt with incidentally in the topic -
as though the author doesn't want to advertise its benefits - whereas tree cover is accorded
pride of place, and the ecological functions and resource benefits of a woodland ecosystem
are explained in detail.
This bias is uncharacteristic of White field (whose latest book, The Living Landscape,
devotes almost as much space to grassland and moorland as it does to woodland, and rarely
mentions permaculture), but it is prevalent throughout the UK permaculture movement. 27
To focus on one example, a land resettlement project I know of involving 21 acres of land
in the West Country, of which more than a third is pasture and the rest arable, commis-
sioned from separate experts both an ecological survey and a permaculture design for the
land. The ecological survey identifies three different types of grassland on the site, includ-
ing an area of 'species rich MG5c' which contains 'seven species considered as indicators
of species rich lowland meadows.' Its authors conclude that 'the grasslands should be kept
as grassland' and managed by grazing livestock and cutting for hay, specifying a low stock-
ing rate of 0.5 livestock units per hectare.