Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
vived and conducted on foot rather than by truck.
• A highly reruralized society would see a revival of fairs, not unlike the growing
number of festivals that embellish the modern English summer, but with stalls that
purveyed the practical as well as the fanciful, and plenty of dealing in horses, live-
stock, cheese, and the like. 'When fairs were frequent shops were not necessary,'
says Cobbett with characteristic hyperbole, and he goes on to explain:
A manufacturer of shoes, of stockings, of hats, of almost anything that man wants,
could manufacture at home in an obscure hamlet, with cheap house rent, good air, and
plenty of room. He need pay no heavy rent for a shop; and no disadvantages from con-
fined situation; and then by attending three or four or five or six fairs in a year, he sold
the work of his hands, unloaded with a heavy expense attending the keeping of a shop.
He would get more for ten shillings in a booth at a fair or market than he would get in
a shop for twenty pounds.
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Anybody who doubts the ability of a society entirely dependent upon animal traction
to shift large volumes of material, or who thinks that country life before the motor vehicle
must have been boring, should read Defoe's description of Sturbridge fair, an event the size
of Glastonbury Festival, but with no entrance fee or security fence, and lasting many days
longer.
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• In some circumstances it might be more economic to employ a shepherd/ cowherd
to guard ruminants, rather than to fence them. This has advantages for animal wel-
fare (disease is more readily spotted) and for land management (grazing of different
areas can be calibrated by the shepherd, and overgrazed areas such as riverbanks
avoided).
• Some herds of ruminants would be returned to barns or folded on fields at night to
supply manure.
• There might be a return to the formerly widespread practice - still found in Eastern
Europe - of family-owned dairy cows being collected by the community shepherd
after milking in the morning and returned for milking in the evening after a day
in common pastures. There are great advantages to this system: it uses economies
of scale where they exist (in grazing and bull provision), but spreads the burden
where scale is a disadvantage (in handmilking and veterinary care); it distributes
milk to every family participating in the scheme; and gives every participating fam-
ily a stake in the management of village lands, and the economic and emotional
satisfaction of owning a cow. The same system was used on the Eastern coast of
the United States, prior to the days of barbed wire. Defoe describes this system op-
