Life After Poo
There is so now so much animal dung in the world that there isn’t sufficient land to spread it on. Tony Wardle tries to imagine a future without any…
The word VOHAN could slip quietly into a Star Trek script without raising an eyebrow. In fact, it is something much more prosaic than that but it is boldly going where few have gone before. Just a couple of years old, it stands for The Vegan-Organic Network and its aim is to promote vegan – organic farming. But, as ever with green issues, there’s more to it than that.
The idea challenges centuries of agricultural practice and wisdom that it is essential to use animal by-products and manure to grow plants. Nearly all organic growers still believe that soil fertility can’t be maintained without them. VOHAN is there to prove that there is horticultural life after animals.
At the moment, the idea isn’t even on the fringe of modern agriculture, it is beyond the fringe. And yet it’s vital to much of ’s own philosophy. The opening shot in our campaign sets out the scale of devastation caused by livestock farming and advocates a plant-based diet as a cure for a whole string of global problems. If we are successful, there will be no farmed animals to fertilise the soil with their dung, their bones and their blood. And this is the fundamental flaw in our argument, according to the meat industry.
VOHAN disagrees and provides the practical proof that animal-free horticulture can feed the world.
Plants are the basis of all life and rather than first wastefully recycling them through animals, it makes greater sense to use them direct. This applies to eatingas well as agricultural needs – fertilising, composting, mulching and feeding.
Green manure is one method. Plants such as red clover, field beans or peas have the ability to extract nitrogen from the air. They can be grown between rows of edible plants to be chopped down and dug into the soil to replace lost nutrients. Mulching – that word beloved of comedians – is a way of smothering weed growth and preserving moisture by laying a carpet of old hay or white clover on the soil between edible plants.
Composting is where plants are first broken down naturally and while we might think in terms of kitchen waste, commercial growers produce their own materials especially for composting. Often it is hay cut from fields kept solely for the purpose.
One of the most valuable sources for composting is the debris and leaves from forests. The towering trees produce huge quantities of fallen leaves, locked into which are many precious nutrients.
Feeding plants the green way can be a smelly process but it’s effective. Weeds such as nettles, docks and dandelions are chopped, crammed into barrels and left to soak in water for a couple of weeks. The slimy, green liquid is diluted and poured around plants. Lovely!
To end today’s dependence on vast, moncultured prairies requires a fundamental political change. Land redistribution is essential but that, of course, will be bitterly resisted. But at least veganic horticulture is no longer just a theory. There are commercial growers already at work, producing fruit and vegetables, improving their knowledge and learning by mistakes. VOHAN aims to be the forum through which information is shared.
What’s on offer isn’t simply a new way of producing fruit and veg but an entire philosophy:
“VOHAN believes in compassion and social justice and the power to control our own lives. To bring this about, animal rights groups, the anti-war movement and non-violent pressure groups must work together because, in reality, there is only one right – the right to live in freedom without fear of death, poverty and oppression.
“The Monsantos of this world seek to impose a tyranny through the genetic modification of plants that includes crossing different species. They are controlling the very basis of life by propagating sterile plants and that this can be acceptable to our, or any government, is almost beyond belief.
“We are not in the business of equating or comparing one holocaust or one tragedy with another. But we do believe that the inhumanity suffered by the hundreds of millions of animals slaughtered for food, in experiments and for cosmetics testing, is on the same spectrum which ends with the concentration camps. That is why we must co-operate with one another.”
VOHAN produces three magazines a year and has an active network of members. They organise courses, publish a list of those looking for land to buy or sell and people seeking paid or voluntary work or who need advice.