The New Agriculture

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31077, 4 June 1966, Page 4

The New Agriculture

Brave New Victuals. By Elspeth Huxley. Chatto and Windus. 168 pp.

We live in a world In which two-thirds of the people are chronically undernourished and vast numbers die of starvation. Food production is increasing but the human population is increasing more rapidly. In thirty years there will be twice as many people to feed. We need a lot more food and we need it fast. In the meanwhile cities, roads and factories sprawl across what was once farming land and the output of food must be increased from what is left. In the search for a solution, people have turned increasingly to intensive methods of food production and the indiscriminate use of pesticides which raise important moral and practical problems. Today, one does not need land to be a farmer. More precisely one doesn’t need much land, for food can be brought to the animals instead of their being left to forage, for themselves. Packed indoors, a large number of animals can be kept on a few acres, and in a controlled environment can be induced to fatten at twice the usual speed. Hens are packed into small cages, where they can neither scratch, perch nor walk, but must grip awkwardly to wooden slats in a dim light; they are laying at six months and eaten at twelve months. Calves kept in crates for twelve weeks in a dim light, mildly anaemic so as to preserve the whiteness of the veal; sweat-box pigs which live perpetually in a kind of Turkish bath, the temperature and humidity maintained by the tightness with which they are packed, and barleyfed beef raised indoors are all features of the intensive methods of food production. As Miss Huxley points out, most indoor animal husbandry is aesthetically unattractive, but the battery system and the sweat-boxes raise more serious problems. The traditional relationship of hunters to the animals they kill and of the farmers to the land they cultivate threatens to become a thing of the past. Hens wouldn’t lay, it is alleged, unless they were happy. Whatever the answer to the question of whether or not the animals are happy, it must be admitted that they are warm, well-fed and safe from predators—other than man.

Christians are not. expected like Buddhists to regard all life, including insects, as equally sacred, but they are expected to respect God’s creation. This is implicit in the first commandment and the unity of all creation is a line of thought which runs through the Bible. How far are man’s responsibilities to

the beasts over which he has authority incompatible with their exploitation as so many egg and meat producing machines?

The messianic age depicted in the Bible was a golden age in which even the beasts would be at peace with each other. When the prophet Isaiah foretold the time when the earth would be full of the knowledge of God and the wolf would lie down in peace with the lamb, he did not envisage this as the result of the extermination of predators through sterility resulting from pesticide residues, and of placidity, induced through immobility, rosetinted contact lenses and the implanting of synthetic female sex hormones. The peaceable kingdom of God was to be ushered in through the whole creation sharing in man’s redemption and not as a result of economic enterprise.

More than moral issues, however, are at stake. In the long run, are the new methods really efficient? In so far as Chemical methods in agricultural food production have outstripped scientific knowledge, is it possible that we may yet have cause to regret the light-hearted way in which we have proceeded to poison the countryside? What for example, happens to those sex hormones which are injected into the necks of cockerels and the ears of bullocks .in order to fatten them and which show such remarkable persistence and resistance even to cooking? There seems every possibility, despite assurance, that we may encounter some disconcerting side-effects from these methods. The only alternative to the use bf chemical fertilisers to boost production, chemical sprays to keep down weeds and pests and chemical drugs to treat animal diseases seems to have come from the organic farmers. Organic methods take more time and trouble, but provide a workable alternative free of potential hazards. Organic farmers, some of whom are unquestionably hard-headed and financially successful, call for an ecological approach, treating men, animals, plants and soil as a part of a single process, the life-cycle. “And as a cabbage, kings re-enter Rome,” wrote Ronald Duncan the English farmer and poet. After the Second World War, six peasants in Switzerland collected refuse in wheelbarrows from greengrocers’ shops and markets, wheeled it to their smallholdings and turned it into compost. These six have now increased to four hundred groups who use organic fertilisers only and have found that they can increase their profits. One of the largest chain stores in

Switzerland has contracted in advance to buy all their produce which finds a ready sale. Most of these farmers have deserted composting for mulching and green manuring under irrigation, but the methods are still organic with no chemical fertilisers. The question is, are these people cranks or forerunners?

Elspeth Huxley handles a controversial topic with the greatest skill and objectivity. With regard to these matters about the only thing people agree upon is the need for more research and for a clearer pattern and direction to research already in train. But there is also a need for an informed public opinion and it is here that the author has rendered a signal service. “Brave New Victuals” reports on a vital problem and leaves readers to make up their own minds—if they can.