Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
house, so we can expect villages, districts and regions to follow the same logic. A kitchen
garden is normally sited near the kitchen; likewise, instead of growing half the country's
vegetables in Lincolnshire and wholesaling them in London, most market gardens will be
located either inside or on the periphery of settlements. There will no doubt still be some
bias between the grain producing east of the country and the pastoral west, but the balance
will be closer to that of the mixed farm economy which existed 250 years ago - though
with higher yields and more woodland.
Within this context there will be fewer domestic animals than there are now, though
that may not be visually apparent, since it will mainly be the concentrate-fed and factory-
housed animals that we will dispense with, and perhaps also because, with fewer stock,
there will be less danger of the land being poached if they are left out all winter. But the
main consequence of a reduction in the number of animals will be that they will have more
value and so more attention will be lavished on them. Currently, although prices are very
volatile, the margins on livestock are ridiculously small, sometimes negative. Nix in 2007
listed average gross margins as £14.69 on a fully reared pig, £1.33 on a turkey and just 8.1
production habitually operates at a deficit, and 'producers have relied upon income from
tances are an insult to the animals themselves, and to the people who look after them.
With meat a scarcer commodity than it is now, prices will rise relative to other goods,
and so every scrap of the carcase will be used, rather than boiled up for pet food or incin-
erated. Farmers will require fewer livestock to make a living, and so will be less dependent
on production line techniques and fossil-fuel powered machinery to complete their work
load. Most important of all to many people, farmers will have more time to devote to the
care of each animal, and to employ labour intensive rather than chemical methods of en-
suring that they stay healthy.
Finally, the role played by animals in a low carbon permaculture economy to a large ex-
tent revolves around the fact that they can walk. God gave them legs, so they might as well
use them. No other industry can be operated quite so easily without the use of fossil fuels,
but that does depend upon how everything is arranged. The examples given briefly in earli-
er chapters - the uses of draught horse and oxen, shepherding etc - may have appeared
frivolous or quaintly Luddite in that context, even though they are widely practised around
the world, because they are so plainly at odds with the economic circumstances in modern
Britain. An urbanized society, with urbanized animals, whose citizens expect just-in-time
steak and hamburger, must deliver animal feed, livestock, meat and waste over distances
and at speeds that cannot be attained by lumbering quadrupeds. Default livestock, on the
other hand, are the natural issue and cohabitants of a permaculture system and so less under
