TOWARDS A PERMACULTURE LIVESTOCK ECONOMY - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 350

Another industry analyst, Ingrid Steen, estimates that the amount of phosphate excreted
by livestock in Western Europe could be some 50 per cent more than the amount currently
applied as mineral phosphate fertilizer - but that a large amount of this is wasted - 'perhaps
up to around 40 per cent could be more effectively spread onto agricultural land'. 76 Günther
estimates that by 're-ruralizing' livestock and people, ie keeping them close to the source
of their food, most of the nutrients can be returned to the soil: 'About six persons are in
nutrient balance with one hectare of land. This means that about 0.2 hectares of such ag-
riculture can support one individual without HEAP effects, provided that the nutrient-con-
taining residues are returned to the agriculture'. 77
HEAPs are also an area of concern for the FAO, who observe:
There is growing concentration of livestock activities in certain favoured locations
… This concentration is driven by the newly gained independence of industrial live-
stock from the specific natural endowments of given locations which have previously
determined the location of livestock production (as they still do for most of crop agri-
culture). 78
The FAO's term for this problem is 'nutrient loading' which, it explains, is due to the
'urbanization of livestock':
Geographic concentration or what could be called the 'urbanization of livestock'
is in many ways a response to the rapid urbanization of human populations … The
separation of livestock production and the growing of feed crops is a defining charac-
teristic of the industrialization of livestock production. Nutrient loading is caused by
high animal densities, particularly on the periphery of cities and by inadequate animal
waste treatment. 79
The FAO's solution is to ruralize 'confined animal feeding operations', or factory farms,
which it considers should no longer be sited like satellites around megacities, but should be
more widely distributed throughout the countryside. Since the SARS and swine flu epidem-
ics, the FAO also cites the risk of disease as another reason for dispersal. 80 This is a move
in the right direction, but unless these factories are subdivided back into smaller farms, the
nutrients will still end up in a huge methane generating HEAP (though in a more bucolic
location) and still require fossil-fuel powered transport to take them back to the land from
which they came.