Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
and the less fertile 'woodland' counties on the fringes where there was a mosaic of trees
and grass, and people kept animals and practised convertible husbandry.
Doubling Tree Cover
In Chapter 9 I outlined how a Permaculture Livestock rural economy could function
without excessive dependence on the lands and resources of other countries. In that scen-
ario the 7.9 million hectares required for staple food production through arable cultivation
and leys are non-negotiable - we cannot do without them. The 3.5 million hectares of per-
manent pasture can only be allocated to another use if we relinquish some of the dairy and
beef which provides a significant amount of the high quality protein available in the diet,
thereby propelling us in the direction of the Vegan Permaculture scenario. However, the 11
million hectares of less productive land, about half the entire country, is negotiable. The
food it produces - a bit of lamb and game - constitutes little more than one per cent of the
national food budget, so we could if we wanted, dispense with that meat altogether, and
allocate the land entirely for uses other than the production of food.
The range of choices we can make about how this land is used correspond to two spec-
trums of land management raised by Patrick Whitefield in the first paragraph of his
Earth-
care Manual
- how woody do we want it, and how wild? The matter of woodiness boils
down to a single question: do we allow herbivores in or fence them out? The matter of wild-
ness is dictated by the intensity of human management. Figure 4 shows how different land
uses are positioned across these two axes. In an abbreviated form, 'wild and woody' means
natural woodland; 'domestic and woody' means short rotation coppice; 'wild and grassy'
means wild animals; and 'domestic and grassy' means cows and sheep. However, there is
an area in the middle occupied by a range of silvo-pastoral habitats exhibiting the kind of
mosaic landscape favoured by Vera, and found typically in remaining scraps of commons
and a few big ones such as the New Forest.
Figure 4. Wildness and Woodiness in the UK Landscape
