Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
cows) next to the market gardens, and not enough (only that from grazing livestock for
meat and from rotation of pastures) contiguous to the arable maincrops. Nonetheless, the
transport implications of firewood use are important. Collecting firewood on a haphazard
daily basis, for those who have the time, is a pleasant and time-honoured occupation. In a
heavily wood-based economy there certainly is a case for siting woodland close to human
residences - or vice versa. Perhaps the woodland plantations whose siting I queried do have
a place close to our Somerset village centre after all.
The ascendancy of sheep over trees in our uplands over the last few hundred years has
lately been assisted by the availability of coal, but the rise to dominance was well under
way before the industrial revolution. 'Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame
and so small eaters', Thomas More wrote in 1516, 'now, as I hear say, be become so great
devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.'
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More was writing when the international wool trade was at its apex, and like all internation-
al commodities, wool, and later mutton, were an agency of enclosure and expropriation. In
a countryside emptied of people, there was less need for folds and fences and firewood, no
need for woodland, and all the more room for sheep.
Now that the sheep scenario is generally agreed to be rather overplayed, there is a good
argument for reintroducing woodland, for biomass as well as timber, and that necessitates
reintroducing people, because biomass has to be sited near where people live. That doesn't
mean imposing a blanket of woodland where once there was a green desert of grass or
heather. There are a number of reasons for keeping a sizable population of sheep in the
country; in particular to bring surplus phosphate and nitrogen from outlying areas onto
arable land, and to supply wool when the cost of importing fossil fuel dependent plastic
fleeces from China rises. The objective will be to restore the balance of timber and grass
which humans, and animals, and indeed the full biodiversity of nature require to flourish in
any environment where there is sufficient water and warmth for trees and grass to grow.
The need to bring humans back close to their biomass is not the only reason for dispers-
ing human settlements more evenly around the country, though it is probably the primary
reason. I shall examine the need for ruralization more generally later. Any system of or-
ganic agriculture which prioritizes mixed farming rotations will be inclined to spread itself
more widely around the country than the UK's population is at present. Up to half of the
high grade arable farms in the east of the country will be required at any one time for fertil-
ity building through legume-based leys, steering them back to the kind of mixed livestock
and arable farming propagated by Coke and his like. The corollary of this is that more ar-
able land will be required in the west of the country.
Much of this arable land already exists and has been conveniently building up or retain-
ing fertility as pasture for the last hundred years or more, except where farmers have been
plundering it for silage. In 2006 I visited Andy Trim, a vegetable producer in Herefordshire
