8 Sustainable Agriculture and Food
on to describe the emergence of modern integrated farming systems, including the
innovative eco-county programme promoted by the Chinese government from
1994 onwards. Ecological agriculture, with a long history of development in
ancient China, is now being ‘enriched and upgraded with the progress of modern
science and technology, and has gradually become a real approach for sustainable
agriculture’.
In 1911, F H King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries was first published, showing for
the first time to the Western world many of the details of agricultural practices and
customs of China, Korea and Japan. At that time, the US was ‘as yet a nation of
but few people widely scattered over a broad land’, and yet the ancient cultures of
the Far East had been intensively farming for several thousand years on the same
land. Here, then, is an early indication of the importance and relevance of sustain-
ability, not that King used this term. Sustainability at least implies being able to do
the same thing over long periods of time without causing harm to the environ-
ment, and King in his travels came to realize this was precisely what farmers in
these three countries had been doing for at least 40 centuries. Many factors were
important, including careful selection of crops and livestock breeds, water man-
agement and soil fertility maintenance. Manures from both animals and humans
were widely used, soil amendments of canal mud regularly dredged and applied to
fields, and nitrogen-fixing legumes were widespread in a variety of rotation pat-
terns. King indicates, ‘almost every foot of land is made to contribute material for
food, fuel or fabric’.
Part 3: Agricultural Revolutions and Change
The landscape itself is a type of common property. It can be enjoyed and appreci-
ated by many if, of course, they are allowed to access it. The idea of commons
implies jointness, something people can enjoy either collectively or individually
and from which they derive value. Over the centuries, two types of common man-
agement emerged in Europe. These were for the common or open-field system of
cropland, which persisted for a thousand years, and the common management of
wild resources, woodlands, pastures, wastes, rivers and coasts. In these systems,
local people held rights for grazing, cutting peat for fuel (turbaries), cutting timber
for housing (estovers), grazing acorns and beech mast (pannage), and fishing (pis-
cary).
Over the years, though, both types of common came to be steadily enclosed
and privatized, mostly as a result of the actions of landowners and the state driven
by the prevailing view that commons were inefficient. The result was an extraordi-
nary transformation of the landscape, particularly in the 18th and early 19th cen-
turies. In the UK, local enclosure had been occurring up to the 17th century, but
the process accelerated with the introduction of parliamentary inclosure acts, dat-
ing from the early 18th century and continuing through 2750 Acts to 1845, the