Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
substituted for oak in shipbuilding. The need for charcoal and brushwood was replaced
by a need for pit props. Purchasers of firewood demanded cordwood rather than faggots.
Meanwhile, large oak trees supplying mast became redundant because pigs could now be
fed from rows of potatoes. To operate efficiently, mechanization required the rectilineal re-
gimentation of the landscape.
The main aim of modern scientific forestry is to produce straight trees of reasonable
sized girth, suitable for the sawmill. Trees like this cannot be grown in a savannah type
landscape, because the abundance of light makes them grow bushy, like the mast oaks that
grow in park land. They have to be grown in the artificial equivalent of a closed forest,
namely a plantation, where they stay straight because they are competing for light. Like the
supposed climax of a beechwood closed forest, a plantation is a monoculture. And like a
closed forest, a forestry plantation can only be created if grazing animals are excluded, to
prevent them destroying seedlings and saplings, and barking trees.
Besides, the foresters argued, there is nothing for animals to eat in a properly managed
forest. The place for grazing animals is a field of grass, preferably ryegrass. The common
lands of non-Mediterranean Europe had to be changed from a kaleidoscope of vegetation
rotating through the spectrum from light to dark - not unlike the Chinese board game
Go
- to a chessboard whose monotone squares were either grass or plantation: 'Certain areas
of land were designated as pasture; others for the provision of wood. Foresters had been
insisting on this division for some time.'
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The diet of animals suffered accordingly. Whereas 'the natural foodstuff of the ancestor
of our domestic cattle was soft, bushy, leafy material, the lower branches of trees, sedges,
herbs and grasses', once fields were enclosed with hedges it became imperative to stop
which in the silvo-pastoral mosaic had served as armour for opportunist oak seedlings, was
employed to fortify entire plantations and improved pastures from the ravages of haphaz-
ard grazers, condemning cattle to a monotonous diet of 'improved' grass. Now, when cattle
escape from their fields, they make straight for the herbs and forbs on the other side of the
hedgerow.
Rackham reports on how enclosure affected English woodland:
An even sadder story is that of the Forest of Dean, which has a rich history of
pastures, coppices, and outsize timber trees, of deer and wild swine, roadside trenches
and industries going back to the Romans … Nearly all this heritage has been effaced.
Dean is now blanketed with plantations of uniform, poorly grown oaks whose later
replacement, in part by conifers, is hardly to be regretted.
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