マーク・パーディはイングランド、サマーセット地方の有機酪農家で、狂牛病と有機リン系殺虫剤の使用と土壌ミネラル欠乏の関係を示す論文を多数執筆している。牛バエ根絶のために牛の背中に神経毒であるフォスメットをかける行政指導を拒否している。

Under the great expanse of striated sky, my motorbike choked its way out from the winter-womb of Burwell Village. Bottoming down from the low hill, I engaged the straight road that dissipated across the distant levels, like a runway touching down into the heart of the frozen fen. For what seemed like miles, I can remember the blur of slumbering coypus, sedge-whipped dykes and grasses hell bent in January hail. Then, emerging out of the pearl-dawn, came the first landmark of my agricultural career: thousands of bleak acres of vegetables.

Nauseated with the cold, I clambered off my bike to clock on at a desolation row of rickety, corrugated pack-houses, barns and workshops. A group of workers were already gathering and huddling up behind the steel sheets in the half light. They were almost embracing each other for their last minutes of shelter before launching out into the ferocious fen for another day of vegetable slashing. All I can remember about those few days that I was able to hold down the job were the mundane, repetitive hours spent hacking my way across a deep frozen prairie of celery. "It was, after all, better than a Russian concentration camp," I kept telling myself.

The farm work force clearly felt estranged from what was once their indigenous, native landscape. There was an air of discontented discordance floating amongst them, and they spoke nostalgically of the days the otters were around, before the coypus came. These laborers resented the fact that a mono-arable/vegetable system of farming had been installed two decades ago after a change in the land's ownership. This had left many of their former work mates jobless, whilst those remaining felt divorced from any aspect of management or relationship with their work. Under the dictates of their new absentee landlord the livestock, the hedges, the muck carts, the willow thickets, the natural watercourses were all whipped out, like extracting an omnivorous dentition in readiness for false herbivorous teeth. All the hallmarks of this mixed farming haven have been transfigured into havoc, just to cater for this businessman's haven for tax losses; losses to offset against the profits from his petrochemical business.

But I do remember admiring the stamina and reactionary insight of one fossilized, peewit-eyed character called Reg Strawson. He had learned to cope with his present predicament by continually escaping into the rustic memorabilia of his past. Reg was the only charismatic character on the farm. All stitched up in a bizarre agri-apparel of Hessian and baler twine, he'd slash out a six hour bout across the oceans of acres of celery; like a flagship adrift, flapping flamboyant strips of spent fertilizer bagging; the last stand of the Olde English fleet in foreign seas. Then he'd perch himself up high on a pulpit of vegetable crates and munch his way through half a dozen harvest pies. With the women mocking him, he'd vent forth his daily parable on the fate of this once-upon-a-time, peaty, organic, friable loam soil (deliberately raising the volume if the farm manager came in earshot). "See yon field yonder (this field now being the northern tip of one big 190 acre amalgamated field), t'was where I pastured the milch cows in former days. Now thee blessed bullocks have gone, the zoil's gone zour there. Stick zoil in with a beet fortch and it clatts to it like clay. It's a sod on ye boots too. In May it's droughted up (he spits down onto the powdery, humusless soil), by June it's blowing over dyke yonder. The manager is maized; tis cans of chemicals robbed the heart out o' it."

I, too, rapidly found myself unable to form any working relationship with this treeless prairie-scape of sterile inorganic moon dust. After rainfall, the soil appeared to glaze over in a petrochemical film; the workers said this phenomenon initially appeared after the first few seasons of routine chemical spraying had been implemented on to the farm. Disillusioned, I left my friends on the fens behind, to wallow in their fond memories of the swallow tails, willow thickets and water lilies; a time that I had not been fortunate enough to witness.

Upon arrival in the West Country I quickly found my niche within the mixed, small farming landscape. Livestock pumped the economic heartbeat that enabled these smaller farms to survive. My first job was to muck out the yearlings' house and I remember experiencing an innate sense of wholeness the first time I watched the shower of dung being flail-fountained out of the back of the muck-spreader; fertile fodder to sustain a living soil.

All of the farms and their staff seemed vibrant with the ethereal relationship flowing between the soil, the crops, the livestock and the landscape. My life metamorphosed effortlessly into higher dimensions, eternally flavored by the mantra of the mixed farm. By day, bull finches and bees droned through orchards like an avant-garde orchestra; hens scuttled in random syncopation beneath the boughs, scuffling up the dust in the nettle beds and churning up the aromatic incense of the earth before the rain came. Evenings were fanned by the wings of horseshoe bats, cockchaffers and chiffchaffs. Dusks drifted into nights screech-scouted by barn owls presiding over rickyards, linhays and looseboxes all bursting with a lava flow of manure; the mainstay of global well-being.

One of the biggest threats currently confronting the survival of the mixed farming systems of the world stems from the hypothetical fanaticism of the various vegetarian pressure groups. For vegetarians are unknowingly tearing apart and terrorizing the environmental and sociological stability of the whole globe. If their “veganic” agricultural systems were to gain a foothold on the soil, then agrochemical use, soil erosion, cash cropping, prairie-scapes and ill health would escalate if we were to carry on producing the quantities of foodstuff sufficient to feed our industrialized population.
But how is it that a practice as seemingly “green” and ecologically innocuous as vegetarianism is actually committing environmental terrorism? Likewise before we can unleash the great potentials of applying human sewage sludge on to the soil, we have to learn of the technological processes by which we can decouple all the myriad organic-toxins and heavy metals that have fallen out from our industrial life-styles into the sewage networks.

If the vegetarian vision is to gain precedence over our global agricultural systems, then chemical and biotech agriculture would boom to make good the shortfall of fertility lost once our livestock were annihilated. Whilst vegetarians would be the last people to wish for such an outcome, the living soils would degrade into inorganic dust bowls like the fen farms and where cash cropping mono-systems are raping third world fertility into sterility. It would be an agriculture that was not the best suited to ecological, economic or sociological well-being.

One of the most nutty, stereotype fallacies emanating from the vegetarians is their claim that crop husbandry is less energy and chemically intensive than livestock farming. Whilst this is true in consideration of the intensive, grain fed livestock units, the traditional mixed farming unit raises livestock for meat and milk off extensively managed, low input grassland systems; and each acre of well-managed grassland can produce four harvests a season of high protein forage utilizing its all-inclusive clover plants as a green manure for fixing free atmospheric nitrogen into the soil. Whereas, an arable cropping system will only yield one or two crops per season, and will largely remain reliant on the inputs of artificial fertilizer for its nitrogen source; one ton of which requires ten tons of crude oil in the manufacturing process.

When such noted, practical agriculturalists as Sir Robert Elliot and Sir George Stapledon have actually highlighted legume based, herbal, deep rooting pasture as the prime fertility restorer, it is somewhat hard to swallow the hypothetical generalizations of the vegetarian groups who are out to trigger a virtual meltdown of