There is some poetic irony in the fact that this year’s “catastrophic” harvest (already looking miraculously rosier) should have occurred as a result of the inundations of August. There are no plants mentioned in Genesis’s account of the Flood, but you can bet that Noah stashed wheat and barley seed away somewhere in the Ark. Grain crops were fallen humanity’s legacy — necessary, redemptive, penitential. Whatever disobedience caused the Fall, Genesis is quite clear about the punishment: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” God thunders, before expelling Adam from his forager’s paradise, “to till the ground from whence he was taken”.
Ever since agriculture evolved in what is now Iraq, about 10,000 years ago, arable farming has played this double-edged role. It has been a convenient way of providing bulk carbohydrate for settled populations, and an even more convenient way of keeping them in order, tied to their jobs and their place. Arable farming generated the first wage labourers and the first capitalists (and the first accountants to keep a tally of the grain stores). Across the globe it was used as an excuse to destroy indigenous systems of producing food, and to appropriate and rationalise the landscape. And what a fallout there has been: vulnerable monocultures, devastated landscapes, disastrous crop failures, massive reliance on chemicals, the insanity of surpluses and the inexorable concentration of land-ownership.
It is one of history’s curiosities why the temperate, woodland-growing regions of the earth should have been nudged into such an exclusive reliance on a food-producing system — and a crop mythology — developed for the barren deserts of the Middle East. Even in modern Europe there have always been alternatives: three-dimensional farming rather than two- dimensional ploughing. In the northern Apennines there is a whole culture (though it’s run-down now) built around chestnut trees. The trees are grown in terraced orchards, and the nuts dried over slow fires before being ground into a flour that is far superior in taste and nutrients to wheat flour. The grassland under the trees is grazed, burnt occasionally to maintain its quality, and supports wonderful carpets of spring flowers. Other chestnut trees are coppiced on a vast scale for firewood. In Crete the beans of the carob tree (they are highly uniform, and were once used as a currency, the original “carat”) are harvested to make flour.
Most persuasive is the economy of the cork and holm oak savannahs of south-west Spain, known as dehesa. This is diverse, and supports a luxuriant ecosystem in its turn. The cork oaks have their bark harvested every nine or so years, and are periodically pollarded for wood to make charcoal. The acorns of both species of oak are delectably sweet, and are sold locally as bellotas. They are also the principal food of the dark cerdo ibericos pigs that graze under the trees. It is an impressive energy exchange. Each tree can yield up to 1,000 litres of nuts a year, which will grow 100kg of pork. And wheat isn’t ignored. Small plots are ploughed and sown with cereals and chickpeas.
Of course, there is not the slightest possibility, given vested interests and an ingrained cereals culture, of our ever replanting Britain’s woods and cranking up a full-scale forest-farming system. But the sceptics’ argument that there is no way you can feed a huge population with, say, nut carbohydrate, doesn’t stand up. The most suitable nut for Britain would be the hazel, which will grow almost anywhere, provided the soil isn’t too fertile. It dries and grinds well, and the flour, mixed with wheat, makes wonderful bread. A modern hazel orchard, as well as being a delightful and naturally rich place, is also hugely productive: up to two tons of nuts per acre, which rivals the output of a wheat-field.
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But there is no point is replacing one monoculture with another. So here is a suggestion, based on one of the more responsible ideas from Middle Eastern religions: the tithe. As land starts to fall out of farming as a result of the current Common Agricultural Policy review, how about turning just 10 per cent of arable land over to hazel orchards and chestnut woods. “Nuts about farming”; it couldn’t lose.
richard.mabey@thetimes.co.uk