Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
effect upon the maintenance of natural landscapes and biodiversity - though not if it res-
ults in the degrading of the flora and the spread of aggressive unpalatable weeds through
overgrazing. In areas where grazing livestock on hillsides and folding them on arable was
carried out over centuries, there does not seem to have been any great damage, and cer-
tainly nothing irreparable. But excessive nutrient loss has to be guarded against, and there
are clearly limits to the amount of nutrients that can be sustainably removed from any giv-
en environment. One way of addressing such limits might be to rotate land, over very long
time scales, between grazing, forestry and wildlife - another dynamic which echoes Vera's
kaleidoscopic model of natural progression.
There is unfortunately a limit to the amount of land that can be given over to such extens-
ive use. In our land budget, there are nearly five million hectares scheduled for wildlife and
rough grazing - about one fifth of the country. But the bulk of this land is currently found
in remote areas. Much of the land in lowland areas will have to be farmed productively, and
can only be taken out of intensive production to the extent that land in more remote areas
is improved and production increased. But there is also scope for intensifying some land
use in lowland areas - for example by reviving water meadows - whilst letting other land
nearby revert to common or conservation land.
The livestock management practices described in the last few pages, some more extreme
than others, are the sort of changes which might occur if the current counter-urban trend
in Britain blossoms into a rural renaissance. They do not, of course, preclude vegans either
as consumers or as farmers: stockless rotations, green manures, nut production, forest gar-
dens, mulching and so on will have a lot to contribute to the texture of the arable landscape.
But it is hard to see how those who shun the use of animals can have any intimate involve-
ment in the management of those parts of the country which are neither arable or woodland
- that is to say the proportion of the country which we opt to keep under grass.
Low-Carbon Livestock
Over the course of this chapter I have been gradually covering the ground necessary to
piece together a vision of what Britain might look like under a permaculture system of land
use which is self-reliant, organic, low carbon and ruralized. There is a balance of land uses
- principally arable, pastoral, woodland and wildlife - with more emphasis on woodland
than at present. However, it is not as if these areas are in large blocks. In order to maximize
connectivity - particularly in a society no longer dependent upon cheap fossil fuels - func-
tions need to be dispersed around the country, more like the colours in a Jackson Pollock
painting than in a Mondrian. With a ruralized population dispersed around the country, the
pattern of land use is likely to be more fine-grained than it is now, and fractal, in the sense
that similar arrangements are likely to be reflected at different orders of magnitude. Just
as farmers place the land uses which require the most constant attention close to the farm-
