Vegan organics is, briefly, any system of cultivation that avoids artificial chemicals and sprays, livestock manures and animal remains from slaughterhouses.
Foot and mouth, BSE, health concerns, environmental worries and concerns for animal welfare have brought conventional growing methods into the spotlight. This has led to serious calls for a switch to sustainable non-animal farming and grow your own schemes.Farmers all over the world are, however, locked into reliance on chemicals and animal by-products and do not know how to extricate themselves from this if they wanted to. Vegans buying or growing their own food may also believe that the prospect of growing organically without animal derived material is impractical or downright impossible.
This highlights a dilemma faced by most vegans all over the world: we don’t want to consume animal derived food but the fact is that animal manures and slaughterhouse by products are used extensively to grow our groceries – especially if we buy ‘organic.’ Indeed, vegans have been accused of hypocrisy over this very issue by those who say that animals are essential to the production of food, whether or not we choose to eat them. So are vegans hypocrites? Is there anything we can do as individuals?
Well, yes there is something we can do. Firstly, we can understand (and tell other people) that animal free food growing is not only perfectly possible, but also environmentally essential. All life ultimately depends on plants, and the plants do not have to be wastefully passed through an animal in order to work. Those who say that animals are an essential part of agriculture have been conclusively proved wrong by the commercial growers who use animal free techniques and by government sponsored research into the subject.
Animal based agriculture is in fact harming the world’s environment. Governments and the public around the world have only limited awareness of these facts; although of course various governments have at least taken some positive steps, such as the encouragement of farmers to develop woodland industries in certain parts of the UK.
Then we can think about growing our own and we can do this using animal free techniques, which are not difficult to master on a small scale. Instead of spreading animal manures and slaughterhouse waste products on the land we can use time-honoured techniques such as composts, green manures and crop rotations for growing over 60 different vegetables in our UK climate. We can also grow perennial crops including perennial vegetables like artichokes and asparagus, perennial soft fruit like strawberries, raspberries and currants and tree crops like apples, cherries and nuts.
