Can Britain Feed Itself?

An interesting article by Simon Fairlie was published in The Land 4 Winter 2007-8 18: http://transitionculture.org/2007/12/20/can-britain-feed-itself/

Simon begins with: ‘In 1975, the Scottish ecologist Kenneth Mellanby wrote a short book called Can Britain Feed Itself? His answer was yes, if we eat less meat.’ He goes on to explore the question in some detail, looking at diet and various approaches to cultivation, including vegan-organics and permaculture.

I posted the following comment on the ‘transitionculture’ website:

Simon’s article is useful theory, and thought provoking, but theory is often a long way from practice. I came across Mellanby’s book recently when embarking on an overdue indexing of my library. Next to it was Andrew O’Hagan’s The End of British Farming (London: Profile, 2001), describing the author’s travels around Britain to witness ‘the death of farming’. Put that with solutions being put forward by food technologists, such as cloned cows (Observer, 2/3/08, pp.16-17), and public apathy: the same article says that ‘More than 30 per cent of people claim to care about companies’ environmental and social records, … but only 3 per cent reflect these beliefs in their purchases.’ The latter provides an interesting rule-of-thumb for any descent from ideas, theories or intentions to doing anything about it.

My own back-of-the-envelope examination of how permaculture could engage with feeding Britain was to start with our one million or so acres of gardens (private-house-and-garden-owning being really big in Britain), and apply one of the very few measures of yield in edible biomass per unit area: Michael Guerra’s tiny urban garden (on 80 square metres 250 kilos per annum can be grown, [over five times the yield typical of Standard Farm Practice] using methods such as intercropping and stacking), suggests – astonishingly! – that we could grow all the food we need, ten times our body weight p.a., on tiny amounts of intensively cultivated land, and if permies had aimed at educating the garden or allotment owning people in this country twenty years ago, instead of … [won’t go into that], who knows, we might have all Britain’s gardens crammed with food by now. And, remember, Bill Mollison originally said the aim was hugely to increase the yield of food per unit area in order to release most of the land back to the wild and other species (Permaculture [the big book], p.7) – and also help the land regenerate because it’s been so buggered it can’t do that on its own. People like Ken Fern and Chris Dixon have shown how, with a bit of help, ecological diversity, biomass and soil depth regenerates to natural abundance in less than 20 years.

Chris Marsh