English Pastoral by James Rebanks (cat reading book .txt) 📗

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In 1915 German government officials were worried about the lack of food available for their population because of Allied wartime blockades. They decided that slaughtering Germany’s 5 million pigs was a good idea. The pigs, they reasoned, were consuming too many plant calories that could otherwise be used for people. The slaughter was called the ‘Schweinmord’ or ‘pig massacre’. It seemed to make perfect sense. But the officials had not understood the role of the pigs in providing manure on farms to fertilize the crops, or that many of the pigs were eating waste products from other crops and households, and therefore converting inedible or wasted organic matter into highly nutritious food for humans. In practice it was a disaster. The following year crop yields fell, and food was even scarcer than before.

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A lot of people have fallen for the corporate propaganda of super-industrial farming. Particularly, its claim that it would supposedly solve all problems by sweeping away the old, less efficient farming, dialling up the intensity of the most industrial farms and somehow freeing up land to be given over to wilderness. There is a big problem with this plan. The new super-industrial farming isn’t sustainable – it is the most destructive farming on earth in both climate and ecological terms. It looks very much as if it won’t endure long, simply because it squanders natural resources and destroys and wastes the soil.

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According to the UN, there are still 2 billion farmers on earth. The overwhelming majority are not high-tech, large-scale or highly mechanized. About 80 per cent of people on earth are still fed by these small farmers, and their crops and livestock are vital in sustaining our farming into the future, super-industrial or otherwise.

It has long been recognized, thanks to writers like Jane Jacobs, that cities and towns that are too specialized – too monocultural, too modern, or too fossil-fuel reliant – work less well in practice than diverse places with a mix of old and new. The new and the old cross-fertilize in all sorts of unforeseen ways. The same is true of agriculture. Rather than making the old farming, and crop species and farm animal varieties obsolete, the most intensive farming needs them for its very survival. The most intensive agriculture on earth relies heavily on the genetic diversity provided by the older farming systems, breeds and crops. Far from being anachronistic and obsolete, the world’s most ‘backward’ farmers are a vital resource pool for the future.

And much of the diverse agriculture that remains is to be found at the margins – in the mountains, remote places, deserts, forests or jungles of the world; in places where isolation, poverty, lack of development, type of climate, altitude, latitude, soil type, disease risks or duration of the growing season mean that intensive agriculture doesn’t dominate and hasn’t swept away traditional farming practices. Such landscapes are full of special varieties of domesticated plants or heritage breeds of domestic animals. This is because for over 10,000 years human beings have had to try out different methods in all kinds of places through trial and error. In the global ‘library’ of farming there can be found a whole range of solutions to millions of different local challenges and problems.

Giant industrial agricultural companies are crawling over these historic farmlands trying to identify, own and patent the riches in them. When the most productive varieties of grain or corn cannot cope with new strains of disease or changes to climate, agronomists will look for the solution in the diversity of heritage grains and corns in the few historic farming systems that survive. When the fastest growing pigs in intensive housed systems cannot cope with a disease, or some form of stress, agronomists will look for the desired robustness, vigour and disease-resistance in the library of heritage pigs either in the wild or in historic farming systems. Our descendants’ ability to feed themselves many centuries from now may well be decided by whether some now obscure grain or pea variety survives, or whether an archaic breed of tiny cow, hairy cold-climate pig or heat-resistant chicken still exists in a muddy farmyard on a hillside in some ‘backward’ place somewhere you and I will never go. If that scruffy chicken or pig carries with it a special piece of the genetic jigsaw, it may be vital.

The essential thing we know about the future – whether we are looking at economics, climate or biology – is that it is unpredictable, so we need to maintain our library of agricultural diversity, both for things we know now that we need, but also many things that we do not yet know we may require in the future. The strength of diversity is that it gives us resilience and robustness for the future. It gives us options. It spreads our risks.

The critical thing is that agricultural diversity doesn’t really survive in a laboratory or in a test tube. Much of the DNA and knowledge that might be essential for our future is systems-based – it survives by being used by people. Breeds of farm animals need sufficiently large populations, with lots of different herds and flocks, and viable local economies, to sustain their genetic diversity and stay healthy and vigorous. Heritage crops need to be cultivated and grown in all their varieties both to keep the old varieties alive and to develop new ones. This means that the farms and farming systems that use these plants and animals need somehow to survive and prosper, and trade, and sustain themselves economically. It is also not appreciated that the most intensive farming systems often use the older systems to produce their raw materials or breeding animals. Lowland sheep farmers in Europe often buy the crossbred daughters of the mountain sheep flocks or cattle herds for their breeding replacements, rather than wasting their most productive land to breed their own.

We cannot have only the most intensive farming and