by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
In the Low Carbon Transition Policy announced by the British government on St. Swithun's Day 2009 it has been announced that farming must become a low-carbon industry.
Now what precisely is that to mean.
As far as can be ascertained one of the aims is at reduction of fertilizer of the chemical kind and its overuse and overuse it most certainly is.
Then there is also the talk about encouraging farmers to take up anaerobic digestion for biogas. This is about time too and we should look at that possibility also in other applications.
If we really want to get to an agriculture that uses less carbon, as they put it, then a move forward into the past is required.
This will mean once again running livestock on arable farms in order to have this animal manure available as fertilizer and the growing of fertilizer crops, such as Alfalfa, as well as and especially the use of horses and even oxen once again instead of tractors and other fossil-fuel powered machinery.
We also must once again work with the seasons and the moon and with Nature rather than against it and against the seasons.
Presently many farmers – especially the managers of the agri-industry complexes – seem to battle Nature all the way and the seasons whether this is in market garden operations, the chicken shed or elsewhere. All of this puts an immense strain on the environment and on resources, especially as regards to energy.
At the present rate most of the agriculture in the countries of the developed world and also in some of the more advanced developing nations is NOT sustainable, not even at the greatest stretch of one's imaginations. Only very few operations in the countries such as the USA and Britain, for instance are, and in the USA they include especially the farms of the older order Amish, and those kinds of people in general, as they still use a way of farming that is close to the soil and Nature.
Taking a leaf or two out of the book of the Amish as regards to farming and actually implementing those lessons would be a good way to start on the route of a more sustainable farming and agriculture and learning those lessons and learning them well could leas us forward to a real good new way of faming.
Nitrate fertilizer use on farms, the more or less indiscriminate one, and its runoff is one of the main sources of water pollution in the countryside and the runoff from slurry and manure also is part of this and must also be controlled.
The concern as to the carbon footprint of farming is an overstated issue; the pollution and heavy fuel and chemical use one is of much greater importance.
With everything presently way too much emphasis is put on carbon/CO2 while there are other pollutants much more harmful and detrimental to our survival.
What good a planet that may or may not have a proper CO2 balance and a nice climate while it has been destroyed and poisoned in other ways.
Farming's environmental footprint is rather large, much larger than any “carbon footprint” of it ever would be. In the environmental footprint calculation everything is taken into consideration, including the water that is extracted for irrigation, whether from the water mains, rivers, lakes or boreholes; the runoff of nitrates and other potentially harmful substances into watercourses; the use of antibiotics in animal husbandry, etc., as it must.
Farming must take a couple of leaves out of the books of farming in the past in order to, once again, become and be sustainable. Presently it is not and especially not so in North America and farming in the UK is not far behind there either.
Agriculture must be brought back down to a human scale and we must get away from the large agro-industrial complexes that do not produce healthy food and neither produce a healthy environment.
While the UK may not have the likes of the beef feedlots as they can be found in the States where the most unhealthy beef imaginable is being created in Britain much of the large scale farming is equally unsustainable.
Many people have come to the conclusion themselves and it is for that reasons that the demand for allotments is well outstripping supply. They want food that they know where and how it has been produced.
Farming can get back to that scale and many more people would take up farming if it would just be possible, that is to say of the land would be available for them to do just that.
Too often the authorities are also not playing ball to make that possible though in that they refuse to allow people to set up smallholdings with dwellings on land that the people have bought on the countryside. A lot must change before faming in Britain will be sustainable (once again) but it can be done. The political will is required though to make provisions for new ways.
© 2009
<>
Low-carbon Farming
