Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
rural schemes may be lower than in urban areas due to the lower heat demand density in
rural areas.
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In other words, the more people who live in the countryside close to forests, the more
people there will be who can benefit from the resource. Why bring Burnham Wood to Dun-
sinane? Why not move people to Burnham?
This is what has happened at Happy Valley, where some of the laurel, together with other
thinnings, are now used for heating and cooking by the dozen or so people who live on 16
hectares of woodland. Everybody's heating, cooking and hot water is fuelled by firewood,
but their low impact homes have an insulation standard which will probably soon be made
illegal (there is less pressure to insulate when you have a surplus of firewood). On top of
that the community manufactures and sells timber which it planks up on a rack-bench saw
driven by a wood-powered steam engine, which is sometimes powered with laurel sned-
dings.
Permaculture designers have developed a system of 'zoning' whereby different land-
uses are cited, concentrically, nearer or further from the centre of human activity - the
farmhouse, village or town - according to the amount of attention required, and hence the
amount of transport to and fro. Typically kitchen gardens and what the French call
basse
cour
- the poultry and pigs that eat domestic and garden waste - are sited closest to the res-
idence in zone 1; orchards, larger scale animal housing and maincrop vegetables a little fur-
ther out in zone 2; main crops, pasture and in Whitefield's view 'small intensively managed
belts of woodland' further out still in zone 3. Both Whitefield and Burnett place the bulk of
woodland, which requires little maintenance, further out still, along with rough grazing in
Whitefield's case and 'forage and collecting wild food' in Burnett's vegan scenario.
The concept of concentric agricultural zoning is common sense, and has been around a
lot longer than permaculture. Cressey Dymock elaborated a zoning model for fenland im-
provement in 1651, but the concentric 'Thünen rings', proposed by the 19th century eco-
which is focussed around larger settlements or markets, is virtually identical to the perma-
culture design, except in one detail. Market gardening and dairy production are again sited
close to the centre of human activity grazing in zone 1, and grazing and wilderness at the
extremities in zones 4 and 5. But in the middle belt, whereas permaculture theorists place
woodland production outside the arable maincrop area, Thünen places it inside, in his zone
2.
This was because in early 19th century Germany, wood was the main fuel and there were
no railways or internal combustion engines; firewood is much heavier than grain, in re-
lation to its value, so the cost of bringing it to market from a distance would be greater.
There is an issue here that manure is even heavier than wood in relationship to its value,
and the von Thünen arrangement possibly places too much fertility (from humans and dairy
