DOING THE SUMS Soil association/Mark Thomas Slightly OT for Graham...

[Guest guest]

>

> Mark Fisher (not a vegan BTW) sent me a post critisising the Soil

> Associations recieved wisdom that animal farming is essential for

> sustainable long term land management in the UK- I forwarded it to

> my Eco-Vegans list, so i'll try & fish it out of the archives &

post

> it here...

 

 

Friday, January 25, 2002 11:24 AM

DOING THE SUMS

 

 

DOING THE SUMS - DOES ORGANIC FARMING REALLY STACK UP?

 

Some people may wonder why it is that I am constantly critical about

organic farming, particularly since I still regularly teach people

how to grow their own food sensibly. The problem is that the

rhetoric flying around organic farming piles up so quickly and so

high in the last few years, that it is vital that there are still a

few people around who are able to maintain an independence of mind

and can think for themselves. We need this lest the continuing quest

to reduce the ecological consequence of food production is going to

be backed into another dead end on the back of the shallow

enthusiasm of the chattering classes (what will be the next

fashion?).

 

In this vein, I went to a very an interesting talk from the Vegan

Organic Network last year. VON is one of the few organisations that

makes an inescapable case for decoupling livestock production from

being necessary in the growing of food. They challenge the orthodoxy

of the organic world (and the Soil Association in particular) that

was fixed at the time of its founders with a backward-facing

insistence on the Norfolk rotation - a rotation based on the

obligatory use of livestock and ploughing. There is nothing natural

about this and yet we constantly hear that organic farming is rooted

in primordial history. Rotation was practised first only a few

hundreds of years ago and agriculture has clocked up only about 5-

6000 years - and what a few millennia that has been, leaving few

areas of the world untouched.

 

What was there before that? Opportunistic foraging and hunting

maintained an early hominid population in amongst an un-degrading,

self-regulatory natural eco-system. The development and dispersal of

agriculture in Neolithic times allowed the hominids to break free

from that self-regulating system and become a dominant but

destabilising influence. Thus food production became an intervention

in nature to ensure an even supply. Thousands of years later, some

hominids have taken anthropocentrism to the logical extreme that

views the success of nature's yields primarily on their ability to

serve humankind rather than ALL earth users. Is organic farming any

different? It concentrates livestock (unnatural) and turns over the

land (unnatural) not understanding that all that livestock do is

redistribute topsoil minerals and that ploughing has made a major

contribution to climate change by the amount of carbon dioxide it

has released into the atmosphere. VON recognise this, doing the sums

that show the fallacy, and arguing for more analysis to be brought

to bear on all the processes so unthinkingly accepted in organic

farming.

 

I was prompted to think about this by a letter in the recent edition

of the magazine Organic Gardening (Jan 2002). Dave from Darlington

(who I know to be associated with VON) stood up for the Advertising

Standards Authority in his letter because it has ruled that organic

farming should not be described as sustainable. He listed organic

farming's faults: reliance on fossil fuels to power tractors; the

deleterious effects of ploughing on soil structure and composition:

the food miles associated with certified organic food (think of the

now - not some rosy future!); the unnecessary reliance on livestock;

and the lack of a coherency that should look to the welfare of

people as well as livestock (don't start me on the fact that I have

met more stinking rich toffs in organic farming than anywhere else).

Dave's judgement was that we do the organic movement a disservice if

we make unjustified claims about its achievements so far.

 

I would go further and say that at its current rate of internal

analysis, the achievements of organic farming can only but lead into

a dead end. Turning to a later article in Organic Gardening provides

evidence for this. Based on a paper in the Journal of Applied

Ecology (Phosphorus balance of contrasting farming systems, past and

present. Can food production be sustainable?, 1997, vol. 43, ppg

1334-1347) Ken Thompson recounts the work of E.I. Newman in studying

the historical knowledge on farming and the use of phosphorus.

Detailed records for a farm of the 14th century on farming activity

and on crop yields allowed Newman to work out a balance for soil

phosphorus that reduced in coincidence with declining cereal yields.

Clearly the farm would have been managed in way that could be

recognised by organic enthusiasts today, but it was also clearly

unsustainable in the long term. Other studies of primitive farming

systems in the paper confirmed this, which raises the question that

if supposedly organic methods then were unsustainable, why should

they be sustainable now? Thompson nails the irrelevance of manures,

pointing out the obvious, that taking it from one place on a farm

(as grass) and putting it on another (as manure) doesn't increase

the total amount of phosphorus. What has changed is that over the

last few centuries, hundreds of millions of tons of rock phosphate

have been mined every year and end up as fertiliser spread on

fields. Over those years, the developed world has become awash with

phosphorus and organic farming is living off the back of that

fertiliser application. Turn completely organic tomorrow and

eventually the phosphorus will run out, ending up, as with most

other soil minerals, in the sea.

 

Where is our future then? At centre must be an array of land and

people-based interdisciplinary thought and design systems that start

to re-integrate to varying degrees our hominid population back into

a self-regulating natural eco-system. Simple as that. Some might

recognise that as Permaculture, but it certainly isn't going to

happen on the back of organic farming.

 

Mark Fisher