Animal Farming

It is absurd even to guess at the acreage necessary to support a person, because land varies enormously in productiveness, and so do husbandmen. But it may help to know that well-farmed land of good quality, without imported fertilizer but with animal manure, will grow two tons of wheat an acre or eight tons of potatoes. Vegetable requirements can be produced on a very small acreage indeed but Man (vegetarians included) cannot live on vegetables alone - that is if you mean vegetables in the accepted sense, excluding grains. Anyone who says "I am completely self-supporting because I grow all my own vegetables" is talking nonsense.

The aim should be the integration of soil, plant and animal that is found in nature, but guided by the knowledge of Man. The common urban belief that animals are inefficient because animal protein requires more land to produce than vegetable protein is a fallacy, as every countryman who's forked a heap of animal manure on his potato patch must know. For although it is true that an animal only transforms a small proportion of the vegetable food that it eats into food for man (or other predators) it is not true that the vegetable matter not so transformed is wasted. It is transmuted, in fact, into a better manure for the land than it would have been. Your rumen is your best compost heap.

The stockless holding can only maintain its fertility by importing fertilizer from outside itself. The amount of waste vegetable matter that can be composted grown on the holding is never enough to maintain fertility. The great stockless agribusiness farms of Eastern England and the grain belts of America continue because of vast amounts of imported ammonium sulphate, and the vegan selfsupporter buys or begs farmyard manure from his animal-keeping neighbours or his land gradually becomes sterile. The amount, of shit produced by a human is almost negligible.

If a Briton has his fair share of Britain he will have about half an acre of good arable land per member of his family, but as most people elect to live in towns we can at least double that and assume five acres of land for a family of four. To maintain and increase the fertility and health of this area without imported fertilizer, herbicides or pesticides demands a great variety of both plants and animals. A thorough rotation of crops must always be practised, for one crop is not affected by the diseases of another, and one species makes different demands on the soil and puts different residues back into it.

The same applies to animals: all grazing, browsing and rooting animals suffer from internal parasites. Keep one species too long on one patch and parasites will build up to lethal proportions. Follow one species by another and each species' parasites will die when ingested by another species.

Different species also make different demands on grazing. Thus adult cattle can eat long coarse grass and should be put first on to new grass. Sheep and horses crop close to the ground and should follow cattle. Goats like scrub and bush country and prefer leaves to grass. Horses suffer on too lush grass they thrive on poor grazing. Pigs eat grass too but will thrive in woodland and can mine deep down for roots, underground insects and the like. Geese will thrive on good short grass but need grain to fatten them. Hens also eat grass and clover but need grain to lay eggs. They eat weed seeds and insects, harmful and otherwise. Ducks and geese of course thrive on wet land and on water. To deny ducks open water, as agribusiness does, is as cruel as keeping hens in battery cages. Ducks eat the snails that cause liverfluke.

Let us imagine that a family takes over five acres of scrubland. First put pigs on to it, concentrated say at half a dozen pigs on half an acre. Electric fence them or contain them with pig-netting, or else tether them, but if there are trees and bushes you can't tether. Take a small piece of land at a time, pig it for three months, then burn the scrub and level, and plant crops. When all the land is thus cleared (pigs will clear almost anything) gradually establish a proper rotation.

Put say two acres down to ley (this means temporary grass-and-clover), an acre to corn, an acre to other crops. Subdivide your two acres of grass, put young cattle on first (because it will be free of lung-worm) follow them with old cattle, follow these with sheep and your horse, and follow these with geese. After three years plough (or pig) one acre of grass and plant say half an acre of wheat, the rest with potatoes and jerusalem artichokes. The three years of grass will have improved the soil enormously. After you've harvested the spuds and such of the jerusalem artichokes (well-dubbed fartichokes by the irreverent) as you want for soup and seed, shove the pigs on to clear the remains.

Follow the roots with spring barley and oats, the wheat with roots. Undersow the spring barley and oats with grass-and clover seed and thus you will have half an acre of fresh 'ley' (grass-and-clover) to run your calves on next year. Follow the half that you have put again to roots with spring corn undersown with grass-andclover. The famous Norfolk Four Course Rotation is: wheat-roots-barley-grass-and-clover. Follow this on your four acres of farm-cropped land and you won't go far wrong. You will grow all the wheat you need for bread, the barley you need for beer and animal feed, and the grass you need for grazing and hay and your land will improve in humus content, structure and fertility from year to year until it becomes the equal of any land in the world.

If it needs lime, lime it from time to time. Cut some of your grass for hay every year. Clamp rootsfodder beet is one of the best, marigolds are fine for milk-production in the winter, marrow-stemmed kale, rape and hungry-gap-kale are winter fodder too - to be grazed off in situ. In the summer work for the winter. Remember, Britain is not New Zealand where grass grows for ten months of the year.

On your acre kept for gardening follow a rotation too. Of course the fruit patch cannot be rotated, but it is better to plant standard (ie high) hard fruit trees so that you can graze underneath them with ruminants or ringed pigs, and necessary that you heavily muck (farmyard manure) soft-fruit trees nearly every year. Brassica (cabbage tribe) love lime, so if necessary lime before them. Peas and beans (leguminosae) follow comfortably brassica. `Roots' (parsnips, carrots, salsify, turnips, beet) come nicely after leguminosae. Potatoes come well after them, but muck heavily for potatoes. Always pig the land after you have lifted the potatoes-the pigs will get what you left. Then lime-then brassica again. Remember that in the garden and the field, leguminosae (beans, peas, clovers, lucerne) make nitrogen, so the more you can grow the less you will miss the artificial fertilizer bag.

Now, on such a holding, everything benefits by everything else. Nothing is wasted. All crop residue and kitchen refuse goes to either pigs, poultry or cattle. Straw from corn is used for litter for pigs and cattle and turned by them into lovely muck. Oats straw, though, is fed to cattle and horses to supplement hay. All shit from all animals goes back into the land. Skimmed milk from butter-making goes to fattening pigs, calves, or young poultry, whey from cheese-making the same. Pigs will fatten on barley-meal and whey or skimmed milk.

After cornharvest follow the scythe with hens. They will eat the spilled corn and also the weed seeds. Move hens in moveable arks over grassland-their manuring and scratching does great good. Aim to grow all your own protein - fish-meal is very expensive and the fish-meal plants denude the seas. Pulses of all sorts (the seeds of leguminosae) are high in protein-especially soya beans; good grass-and-clover cut young and made into hay and silage is also high in protein; fodder beet is fairly high; dairy byproducts are high; but corn (wheat, barley, oats, rye, maize) is fairly low. Experiment with high-protein crops and defy the debt-collector from the `farmer's co-op'.

Hens will lay eggs on young grass and grain alone. Hens will go broody and rear their own chicks much better than an incubator can. Let them. Sows will farrow twice a year out of doors with the meagrest of shelters and provided you don't keep them on the same land more than four months at a time will never get ill. Two cows will provide you with milk, butter and cheese, help the pigs and poultry with their by-products, help the land with their manure, and give you two calves a year for beef, or for money if you are squeamish. The pigs will do much of your cultivating, but a mare also will help enormously. She will live on what you can produce on the holding alone, work amazingly quickly and well (she is ten times faster than a garden cultivator) and will do what no tractor in the world has ever done yet - reproduce her species.

One more thing. Plant trees somewhere on your holding, and leave some wilderness for wild plants and animals. The Earth was not created just for our benefit.

John Seymour