Monthly Archives: March 2012

Seven Arguments for Grass

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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.

  1. The greenhouse gas emissions scenarios involving ruminants are complex – ploughing up permanent pasture or transforming it to low productivity uses such as woodland also create emissions, either directly or indirectly in the case of uses that displace agricultural productivity onto ‘ghost acres’ elsewhere. A case can be made for ruminants when they’re incorporated into a productive, mixed agricultural system. The emissions associated with extensive ruminant systems are easily overstated, obscuring more significant sources such as fossil fuel use. Some people, such as Graham Harvey in his book The Carbon Fields, even suggest that ruminants on permanent grass can be highly productive and even carbon negative through the medium of carbon sequestration in grassland soils. I think this takes the argument a step too far. But a good case can nevertheless be made that there is no simple equation of ruminants with environmental ‘bads’.
  2. To farm sustainably probably requires that most fertility inputs are produced on the farm itself. So the farm needs both fertility-making and fertility-taking parts, with grass being an ideal example of the former and ruminants an important low-energy vector between the two (in the absence of synthetic fertiliser, permanent grassland can be as productive as fertilised temporary grass leys).
  3. Pasture is an extensive land use that allows large areas of land to be managed effectively with relatively small inputs of human labour or fossil energy. This contrasts with cultivated ground which is demanding of labour and energy. In the present economic climate, neither land use is financially remunerative so there’s a case for mixing and matching between the two – at Vallis Veg we can’t manage more cultivated land than we already have in cultivation, and no one is queuing up to take on land from us to cultivate. Actually that may not be quite true – I gather there’s a waiting list of around 90 people for allotments in Frome. But suppose we ploughed up all the permanent pasture and rented it out to people wanting allotments. Where would they get the fertility for their veg from? Doubtless by trucking in loads of manure, the fertility in which ultimately derives either from a fertiliser factory or from someone else’s grass, or both. Keep fertility local, I say.
  4. If well-managed, permanent grassland accumulates fertility over time that can if necessary be ‘cashed in’ through more intensive uses at a future date. Keeping an area of ruminant-stocked permanent grassland on the farm can therefore act as a buffer for future agricultural needs.
  5. Related to the preceding point, permanent grassland is a ‘neutral’ form of land use, which is relatively easy to maintain in its existing state – it can easily be turned into more intensive (cropping) or less intensive (woodland) land uses, but each of these are more committing and less reversible forms of land use.
  6. Going back to the permaculture movement, various interpretations of permaculture involve emphasis on perennial over annual crops, maintaining ground cover and valuing traditional local agriculture. Permanent pasture involves a mostly perennial permanent ground cover and is a traditional form of land use in southwest England where Vallis Veg is located, and where grass grows especially well.
  7. Ruminants furnish a variety of useful products, as mentioned above – meat, milk, fat, hides and wool. Non-ruminant derived substitutes for these are often of more exotic and energy-dependent origin.

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…

The Survival of the Richest

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Yesterday I went to an equipment sale of an organic grower who’s closing down. I picked up one or two bargains, which was nice – but not nice enough to compensate for the sadness I felt. It wasn’t just the uncomfortable feeling that at the next sale I attend it might very well be me doing the selling, but also the feeling that each of these occasions is one more small example of how badly wrong we’re getting our food system.

If you believe certain ideologues then yesterday’s event was a necessary evil – the tough love of the free market in action, ensuring that only the most innovative and efficient producers get to stay in business, thereby helping to reduce prices and ratchet up productivity. If I’d been around two hundred years ago I might have been one of those ideologues myself, because back then they were probably right. Most of the land was in the hands of the gentry and there was little of the so called ‘market discipline’ around to ensure that prices weren’t inflated to suit the interests of the landholding class. So when the founding fathers of economics such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo formulated their theories of how markets ought to work – with the market’s ‘invisible hand’ finding an equilibrium between competing consumers bidding the price up and competing producers bidding the price down – it must have seemed a revolutionary doctrine for revolutionary times.

Things turn full circle. Nowadays food markets – most markets, actually – are dominated by a few retail behemoths, the new gentry of our age. For although it may be in the interests of society as a whole to have healthy competition between numerous firms, it’s in the interests of any particular firm to eliminate their competitors – which is what the retail giants have done, very ruthlessly.

Well, doesn’t that just go to prove that the big retailers are the best competitors in town? I’m not so sure. Maybe it did once, but in each cycle of market loss and gain financial advantage accumulates in the hands of the victors until sheer market dominance and financial speculation replace resource efficiency and technical innovation as the main route to business development. When I studied economics I was taught that for markets to work efficiently it was necessary to have ‘innumerable’ producers to prevent excessive rent-taking. Currently four companies control 75% of the retail food market in the UK. The Office of Fair Trading – whose job it is to prevent monopolies in order to ensure market discipline – believes that ideally there ought to be another five. Ah well, I suppose nine is a better approximation to ‘innumerable’ than four. But the truth is that the retail giants don’t dominate because they’re more supple and innovative. They dominate because they displace as many costs as possible onto others – taxpayers and farmers, for example. They dominate because they create low-cost food out of ecological rent. And they dominate because they use capital and market control as a weapon.

The way this plays out on farms around the world is this: anyone wishing to invest in the long-term ecological or social wellbeing of their farm or their community loses; anyone seeking to replace cheap but polluting inputs such as fossil fuel with costlier but more sustainable ones such as human labour or site ecological services loses; anyone who refuses to shave margins by investing in larger and newer plant loses. And a lot of people who do none of those things lose too. Our research shows that at Vallis Veg we produce food with much greater energy and carbon efficiency than large-scale farmers and supermarket retailers – but those aren’t the grounds on which market efficiency is judged. And this, ultimately, is why farm concentration continues apace and the farm sales go on.

Defenders of the status quo often point out that the big operators usually started out as small concerns, the implication being that somebody starting a smallholding or a corner shop now can aspire to replicating the same business success if they’re good enough. But when Jack Cohen started the market stall in East London in 1919 that was to become Tesco, I wonder what share of the national food market the four biggest grocery retailers had – I’d be willing to lay a bet that it was a whole lot less than 75%. Anyone starting out in food retail today is looking at a ladder swiftly receding into the sky.

I always find it intriguing to think of parallels between the natural and the social world. Is retail monopoly just like ecological succession? A bare patch of earth is initially colonised by a riotous multitude of pioneer plants, which have evolved good strategies for spotting an opportunity and quickly moving in. But as time goes on they fall by the wayside, replaced by a smaller number of strongly competitive plants such as forest trees, which block the light and strangle out the competition. I can think of two main differences between ecological succession and market succession. First, although the climax ecological community may be dominated by a smaller number of main species there are still innumerable niches for other species to find their place (way more than nine, at any rate) – like bluebells flowering in the spring woods before the big trees have gained their leaves. I like to think of local veg box schemes as the bluebells of the retail world. Unfortunately, the retail giants can do what no forest tree has ever managed and turn themselves into bluebells too. Hey, you want fresh locally grown food delivered to your door? Well, we can provide that too, and provide it cheaper! It’s not so local, it’s not so ecological, it’s not so socially beneficial, but who’s asking?

Second, the ecology of patch dynamics shows that ecological dominance is always provisional. The forest trees may dominate for now but it’s a dangerous world – a storm blows the trees down, or they’re laid low by a fungal disease, or a lumberjack, or an elephant. In nature, there are endless opportunities for renewal. The climax community of the forest has never managed to do what the climax community of the retail world has done, and create governments or Offices of Unfair Trading to police its interests for it and vigilantly crush any signs of retail renewal. One advantage of the ecological community is that it builds in redundancy and resilience, so that when the forest giants fall there are other organisms ready and waiting to take their place. Will anyone be ready if the retail giants fall?

I apologise if this post sounds angry. I do feel angry that good farmers are going to the wall for no good reason. But I don’t know what to do about it other than rant on my blog. If you’ve got some better ideas please post them below!