TOWARDS A PERMACULTURE LIVESTOCK ECONOMY - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 346

Centralized processing units also generate a form of cross-haulage:
It has always seemed absurd to me that Kansas farmers should ship wheat to Min-
neapolis and then have flour shipped all the way back from Minneapolis to Kansas
… . In the milling of flour - which lends itself so admirably to local production - we
have drifted into a state of affairs where ten of the national mills are able to supply 50
per cent of the consumption of the country.
The same applies to meat:
The development of the refrigerator car made it possible to ship fresh meats great
distances … As a result we now have the absurd system whereby the raw products of
an industry, in this case the livestock, are shipped great distances to the meat packing
centres and then, after being slaughtered, shipped equally great distances back to the
point of origin. 61
Borsodi wrote several other books, including one called Flight from the City , which was
a practical guide to rural self-reliance. He initiated a number of agrarian settlement schemes
(some more successful than others), worked in India with Jayaprakash Narayan on the fin-
ancing of the gramdan land resettlement project, founded a 'School for Living' which is
still going, and helped introduce the now flourishing concept of Community Land Trusts. 62
However his economic analysis was ignored and the academics and campaigners who ini-
tiated the concept of food miles in the early 1990s did not appear to remember him. 63 Now,
when even the NFU is talking about food miles and has belatedly launched a campaign
in support of farmers' markets, most commentators have not yet caught up with Borsodi,
nor will they until they recognize (a) that it is not just a matter of food miles but 'resource
miles'; and (b) that we will just be tinkering around with this problem unless we find a way
of siting people close to the resources that they use. 64
The case for ruralization has been advanced recently by Richard Heinberg, as a corollary
of his view that oil prices will rise dramatically when global oil reserves reach their pre-
dicted peak in the next few years. 65 Heinberg anticipates that in an economy running on
limited supplies of oil (and without any substitute form of energy, such as nuclear) the US
will need to find another 50 million farmers to grow its food. This figure is based on the
experience of Cuba in the 1990s when, deprived of financial support and cheap oil from