Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on March 22, 2012 | 14 Comments
I was talking about woodland and grassland in my last but one post before I so rudely interrupted myself to have a rant about supermarkets and farm closures. So let’s get back to the subject of grassland.
Since most of us have had little more experience of grass than as somewhere to play in our parents’ gardens it’s not surprising that we often struggle to think of it as a crop. But grass can be extraordinarily productive (worth thinking about before you go and exercise your dog in some poor soul’s silage field), with the additional benefit of providing a zero till, year round, perennial ground cover of the sort that makes permaculture aficionados drool.
The big problem with grass is that unfortunately it’s inedible, at least to us humans, and the only way we can farm it usefully is by taking advantage of ruminant livestock and their gutfuls of friendly bacteria to turn it into meat, milk, fat, wool and hide, thanks to their 40 million year co-evolutionary dance with the grasses. And the problem with that is that it’s quite an inefficient way of getting nourishment into our bodies, as a million tonnes of vegan promotional literature is only too happy to point out. To make matters worse, ruminants belch out a load of methane which adds to the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
In upland areas where it’s not possible to grow anything other than grass there’s a case for farming ruminants. And in lowland areas where the farmer wisely decides to do without factory-made fertility and to create fertility on-farm instead by sowing grass and clover in rotation with arable crops (aka organic farming), there’s also a case for farming ruminants – but in this case the grass has to be temporary and so some of the benefits of perenniality that get permaculturists so excited are lost. Harder to justify on the face of it is keeping lowland farms down to permanent pasture, when the land could be put to more productive uses.
At Vallis Veg, about 25% of our lowland farm is down to permanent pasture – which of course I wouldn’t dream of admitting publicly if I didn’t already have a raft of excuses reasons up my sleeve to justify it. So here they are – please read them and then tell me why I’m wrong.
A slight flaw in my grand design is that currently we don’t actually have any ruminants on our permanent pasture. But hopefully we soon will. At present we don’t live on our site and to be honest running a market garden from afar is hard enough without having to worry about a bunch of sheep and cows as well. But we’re hoping to get planning permission to live on our holding. If we do, we’re aiming to keep ruminants on the grass as well as run the market garden and create good nutrient linkages between the two. If we don’t then we’ll probably mothball the market garden, giving us the time to bring in some ruminants and look after them. Unless of course you can spot any flaws in my reasoning and tell me why we should do something entirely different with the grass…
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If you let the pasture gradually return to woodland (without planting), this wouldn’t require any input, or create any emissions, and would also sequester carbon; an option you don’t consider in your analysis above.
That said, I think leaving much of it to permanent pasture is a good idea, in the short term at least, until you can establish how much space you need to provide fertiliser, and get the balance between more and less intensive uses right. (If you can produce more fertiliser than you need from the land then you should convert more of it to more intensive uses, and find some people to look after it for you, if you are unable to!)
Very useful post, thanks!
Thanks for your comment, Ben. Yes natural woodland regeneration would be an option – I suppose my take on that is that it’d be good for wildlife/ecological value but not for agricultural or forestry output, so arguably it might have an implicit emissions cost. If after 10+ years you decided you needed to bring it back into production would the energy/labour costs of doing so outweigh those of annual topping or grazing? I suppose you could stick some pigs in it for a while to give you a helping hand.
The fertility issue is also interesting – how much land you need to create fertility depends on what kind of strategy you adopt. If you sow lots of leguminous leys you’ll need less land than if you gather fertility through extensive grazing of permanent pasture, but the former is a more intensive and energy-hungry land use and of lower ecological value. Perhaps I’ll post something on the so called ‘land sharing/land sparing’ debate soon along those lines. Interesting issues anyway – thanks.
You missed a couple.
8. Anyone who designs an agricultural system only on the basis food energy efficiency is a reductionist nutter and probably an academic. It is best to ignore them.
9. We have had our own co-evolutionary dance with grasses for several hundred thousand years. In fact we crashed the dance held by the ruminants and ate the hosts. Our nutritional health is probably well served by including ruminants in our diet. Maybe not if they have been eating grass grown with modern farming techniques though.
Thanks for another incisive post, Paul. Not sure I agree with you on point 8 though – a bit too close to the bone for my liking. But since you’ve posted a reply and are therefore not ignoring me I’m hoping that you may be exempting me from this particular criticism?
I certainly agree with you on point 9. There’s also another dimension to the human evolutionary dance with grass. As well as learning how to be grassland predators, our ancestors had to learn how not to be grassland prey. The palaeontological evidence suggests as I understand it that our ancestors were arboreal apes who then had to deal with the problem of a drying climate, thinning trees and expanding grass in East Africa, pitching them into a habitat where they were easy meat for grassland predators. This created a big selective pressure to get smarter and start learning how to use fire, tools etc. out of which the genus Homo emerged. I’m not sure there are many selective pressures on us to get smarter at the moment though! But as I’ve argued here http://www.campaignforrealfarming.org/2011/10/city-capitalists-or-agrarian-peasants-where-does-the-future-lie/ the time may come again when the genus Homo is refreshed by selective pressures in Africa.
Apparently we are evolving to better fit the environments in which we find ourselves now! Who knows we may even evolve to remain healthy on the products of modern farming and food production? Seems unlikely. But I really hope we don’t get “smarter”. That’s the attribute which got us into the condition where we can commit countless crimes against humanity and nature and label it progress. How about more “wise” instead. Probably less smart would do the same trick. On a more optimistic note Ian McGilchrist argues that left brain dominance is a culturally mediated phenomena and so we may be able to rebalance ourselves without waiting for evolution to do the job. We could even become so de-smarted that we establish agricultural systems with well being as a success criteria rather than continue to cleverly design ways to produce more food energy for an ever expanding population. A life support mechanism for a terminally sick species.
Interesting point – I think as a species humans are probably congenitally incapable of not trying to be smart, but I agree that there may be some scope for us to try learning to be smart in a wise way rather than in a smug and lazy way. Not sure quite how much scope, though – we need a very different kind of economy to make it feasible. On the agricultural systems, I’d say that we do need to cleverly design ways to produce enough food energy for the population, but enough needn’t mean more, and clever needn’t mean high tech/high energy.
Interesting post. The one question I have – stockfree green manure systems are criticised for running down the P&K – I totally get that and we have embraced bringing in new societal organic waste fertility onto our market garden in the form of tree surgeon and brewers waste. When humanure is allowed under the organic standards we will also be bringing that in too to complement our 33% green manuring. How can a mixed farming system work and not run down the P&K aswell when the animals are sold off site and also because P is a big part of the bones? Does the same criticism apply?
I think we should all be trying to produce maximum calories from minimum land whilst using agroecological techniques. Otherwise some other ghost acres are getting it somewhere. Britain is one of best countries in the world for growing rain-fed fruit and vegetables and that is, in my opinion, what we should be doing. We are hoping to be copying the guys soon in Powys and growing fruit on sites that hitherto have only been felt appropriate for livestock but growing berry fruit is a heritage use of the uplands of Lancashire and it is pretty bleak up there.
Thanks for your post Jenny. I can’t say I’ve thought this one through in any detail, but I’d imagine the same criticism would potentially apply. Presumably you can accumulate P & K for crops from grassland if you treat it as an extensive resource, but I imagine you’d get into a tricky balancing act with pasture nutrient status, stocking densities and off-site sales. I’d be interested to know more about P & K budgets in relation to the life cycles of breeding stock and stock for slaughter. But I’m not really advocating mixed farming with an emphasis on maximising livestock sales, so much as market gardening with a bit of grass thrown in. In our particular situation, I think we’d probably eat a fair proportion of the slaughter stock ourselves and hopefully keep hold of the nutrients.
I agree with you in principle that fruit could be a good way to go – though I imagine you’d still have a ground layer of one kind of another to think about. The problem in my experience is that you can’t spread yourself too thinly on a commercial holding and most of us rarely get to farm on holdings of a size perfectly suited to our requirements. Having said that, we are in fact planting quite a lot of fruit trees and bushes!
If we lived in a sensible world we could design the farmed landscape at a community level, creating good nutrient flows from farm to customer and back again, and fitting agricultural workers appropriately to the land available. But I think the next best thing for me at present may be to try to use my grass as I’ve suggested but I’m open to further suggestions.
Re nutrient budgets. The great disadvantage of eating ruminants – that they use most of the energy they consume and we only get to eat a small percentage of the original energy in the grass – is also their great advantage, because the same can be said of the mineral nutrients they consume. The P, K etc that actually goes off the farm is much the same small percentage.
Meanwhile, rock weathering and aerial deposition are constantly adding to the pool of exchangable nutrients. Whether the loss in meat, milk and wool is comparable in quantity with the gain from these sources I haven’t the faintest idea. Only that it strikes me that this equation, or something very like it, must have played a part in our ability to go on farming this land for some 6000 years.
Thanks for that Patrick – very interesting point!
Hi Patrick and Chris
My interest is in the UK and most land use is a reality recent thing and all propped up with brought in nutrients be it grassland or arable. Now I believe that we are in the time of resilience and coping how do we close these nutrient cycles and produce maximum calories? To not be producing maximum calories from biointensive arable systems means to me that some other ghost acres are taking the brunt – probably some pristine environment that our global commons cannot afford to loose.
I have revisited Simon Fairlies “livestock permaculture” scenario and even he advocates keeping vegetable production / market gardening seperate in urban / peri-urban scenarios. Just feel like no one is properly championing this approach in the permaculture movement which to me make perfect sense and is possible for someone who has not inherited land and cannot afford to live in rural areas. We live 12 miles from Liverpool and land prices are now £10k an acre just regular farm land which is ridiculous.
Ignorning permanent grassland for a moment is imposing a mixed farming system on arable land a good thing? Bearing in mind that livestock are such a physical 365 commitment if you don’t live on site. Also should grassland be viewed as a feedstock for energy silage? I know the draught animal argument often gets brought up here but in reality we haven’t or won’t have the breeding draught animals in the near future. Are green manure pure / mixed stands without grass better for biodiversity? Bees love it when you let them flower especially the clovers.
Our landlord and our friend have cattle and sheep respectively. I can see with the cows that little ground hugging flowers get a chance but with the sheep it is so tightly grazed nothing much is happening flora wise although I accept that sheep are good at killing annoying weeds like docks. Pigs are interesting for there ability to turn over ground but again looking at our landlords saddlebacks it is has taken them 18 months to clear the weed infested ground and it now needs levelling. It is hard to see how we could include any of them on our market garden (i.e. an arable system) without paying out a ridiculous amount for fencing and even then the little piglets are masters of escape. Is mixed farming always the answer?
Sorry – forgot to add to Patrick’s point I am sure rock weathering and aerial deposition play a part in hunter gathering food systems but very unsure about them in farmed systems especially with the current human and livestock population explosion. These beasts, vegetables and grains that we take from the land are “pumped up” versions of their wild relatives and inherently take more nutrients out of the ground, especially as I said P is a major constituent of bones and if they are sold off the farm which most are.
Thanks for your posts, Jenny. I didn’t intend my original post necessarily to be a full on justification for mixed farming so much as a milder suggestion that it may not be an altogether bad thing to have a bit of permanent grass around a market garden – particularly in the context of a lot of people saying rather unthinkingly that farmland ought to be cultivated for human crops without thinking about where the fertility comes from. But to pick up on a few of your points, I’d say:
I agree that there’s a lot to be said for biointensive arable/market gardening in urban/peri-urban settings, and I also agree that it needs more championing. I’m glad you’re doing so! I think the permaculture movement sometimes errs in focusing too exclusively on domestic production, and we need to look more at commercial production – which is something I also want to champion via this blog, among other things.
At the same time, as I suggested in http://vegboxpeasant.com/?p=65 I don’t believe that it will be possible to produce all the vegetables we need in urban/peri-urban settings, particularly if we include staple vegetables such as potatoes in the mix (see http://vegboxpeasant.com/?p=54). Therefore I think we need to be thinking about different kinds of farming in different settings, and we also need to be thinking long-term about population redistribution because global urbanisation isn’t sustainable.
I’m not so sure that not producing maximum calories from biointensive arable necessarily HAS to mean leakage into pristine global commons, though I agree that it generally does at the moment. Let’s stop growing arable crops for livestock feed, take a long hard look at our diets and then think about what farming systems we need. When we do, I think there will be a role for more extensive systems alongside biointensive arable – though I have no idea what the relative balance should be. Again, this references the land-sparing/land-sharing debate which Simon Fairlie touches on in Chapter 15 of his book – I’ll try to post something more on this soon.
On biodiversity, I agree that flowering green manures can be good insect attractants but I’m not at all convinced that they’re better for biodiversity overall. As part of arable rotations, they’re high fertility and high disturbance systems, both of which militate against biodiversity. I think pure grass ruminant systems are likely to have greater biodiversity benefits, though much does depend on how they’re managed. I’m assembling some information on this so I hope to come back to it in the future.
On livestock, my experience of trying to integrate them with market gardening is that they’re not quite as troublesome as you suggest, but I agree that they’re a lot of work and it’s usually easier just to use a tractor to do whatever needs doing. But in truly low energy systems where cheap fuel isn’t available, livestock would come into their own.
On nutrient budgets, I don’t really know. I think Patrick’s point is interesting, and I suspect he’s right in the context of a proper local extensive livestock system with slow-growing animals and return of livestock carcases, humanure and other small P inputs into the system. In the present context of intensive meat production and non-cycled human and slaughter wastes I think you have a point.
There’s room for debate about the correct balance between grassland and cropland or livestock and arable, but as usual everything basically points to a local, low energy, nutrient cycling agriculture!
Hi Chris
I enjoyed your summary and it seems a sensible way forward.