The Craziness of Farming

If you had to make a list of human activities that were completely and utterly bonkers, I think you'd find, on looking around, that farming would, especially industrial farming, would be pretty near the top. In industrial farming we have an activity that wreaks havoc on the land it farms, uses up

 

Is there anything more unhealthy than modern farming? It's unhealthy for the soil, it's unhealthy for farmers and farm workers - a life of endless toil for little money - and much of the food it produces is unhealthy too, let alone gluten and dairy products, there's not much produce that has optimum nutrition, and even those relatively few wholesome items have to be packaged and shipped out to supermarkets. The farmer will have inherited a range of more or less falling down buildings which are expensive in time and materials to maintain. The whole system belches out carbon from fuels and animals from field to fork and is a disaster for the planet too. The luckless farmer is at the mercy of the weather, the market, political twists and turns and consumer whims. At 400 ppm CO2 and rising we have not just to stop the crazy machine but put many of its processes into reverse. 

Imagine you have a time machine and can jump forward to visit a sustainable farm in the future, Future Acres, when we have it all sorted out. What would you see? Well, there's a few things you're not going to see very much of...

1. TRACTORS use fossil fuel so they've pretty much got to go in their present form at least. Maybe we can run a few on renewable energy but we need to get that carbon back in the ground, so no tractors or very few tractors and the same goes for...

2. COMBINE HARVESTERS they've got to go for the same reasons and also because without lots and lots of tractor time we're never going to be able to plough, sow, roll, harrow and spray those fields like we generally do at the moment so we're not going to need combine harvesters because there won't be...

3. VAST FIELDS WITH JUST ONE CROP GROWING IN THEM... it's beginning to look a bit different. So what are you going to see? Maybe some animals? How about a milking herd so we can have lovely milk in our coffee and tea and maybe produce a cash crop like cheese or butter or something? No, sorry if you see cows at all there won't be many and they'll be quite different...

4. MILKING HERDS AND BEEF HERDS in their 2016 form have got to go. One reason being that they're generally kept indoors over winter in the UK at least, so you need those machines that we can't use much anymore to handle all their poo and to cut their pasture fields and pack and store all the fodder they're going to need. There's places where you can keep cattle outside and breeds of cattle that cope with that better, so maybe we can have some cattle. In fact, before humans changed the landscape there were vast wandering herds of bison, aurochs and so on, whose farts, by the way, did not overload the atmosphere with carbon, an important point. Then there's a couple of moral questions for us: is it ok to keep cows permanently in calf or briefly with calf so that we can then take their calves away and take their milk? And of course, is it ok to kill and eat animals? So how about some...

5. SHEEP, yes you might see a few sheep. Nothing like the huge herds at the moment which graze whole hillsides down to the bone, but small herds managed with fences and gates so that some of the land is allowed to develop into its maximum diversity. Again they might be different kinds of sheep, smaller tougher better adapted for diversity.

6. CHICKENS AND DUCKS

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SO WHAT ARE WE GOING TO SEE?

Well, what would happen if you inherited a farm, sold off the milking herd if there was one, maybe kept a few sheep, goats, ducks, chickens.... it's beginning to look like a small holding or homestead isn't it?... and took stock of what you had left. Then suppose you did nothing at all with some of it? What would happen there? It would quite quickly revert to woodland.

So the thing is, how can we tweak our woodland/minimum livestock/left as wild as possible system so that we can supply ourselves with our needs of food, fuel, building materials, medicinal herbs, clothes, an income etc etc, using the very minimum of machinery time? 

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