Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

domestication horse
Horse power
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Recently, there has been a slew of posts about horses on this blog with more discussion than explanation. Some of you may remember that the narrative line goes back to prehistory, when humanity was sheltering from ice age climate alongside a number of species that we now work with very closely, such as horses and cows, not forgetting companion creatures, such as cats and dogs. During the ice ages, we didn’t get to choose a place to shelter, we just piled in and got by as best we could. At one end of the spectrum, living in one place by choice can be called domestication, at the other end it can be purgatory. Everybody brings something different to the party: night vision; accurate identification of wild fungi; encyclopaedic knowledge of next year’s runners in the Grand National; whatever. For centuries, the norm has been anthropocentric and horses are expected to fit in with some pretty unimaginative stereotypes. An animal that goes down the gallops most days with Grand National runners would form a view of its rivals fast enough, but it will take humans an eternity to tune into this idea, let alone think of asking for an explanation. Horses just get it. They can see a problem when it’s still just a dot on the horizon.

Humanity, on the other hand, will get shirty and go to war rather than sit down and talk through a problem. At the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial world slaughtered thousands of men and horses for no good reason. Sending mounted troops to shut down machine gun nests just made it worse. For centuries, horses have worked alongside the toiling masses, dragging felled tree trunks to waiting lorries; towing delivery vans; hauling lifeboats to safer launching sites; all manner of heavy work. One hundred years ago, horses used to fill in the gaps in delivery systems, the fabled final mile.

Back then, equidae had a role to play, but things are different now. Somewhere in the economy, a landslip buried the past, imposing a new order and rewriting history.

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Asia seafood
Korea choices
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The Korean island of Jeju is special: once upon a time, seaweed growing around the island used to feed grazing abalone populations. These were fished by the Haenyeo, free diving fisherwomen, who used to earn enough from their activity to be able to feed their families.

Haenyeo swim and fish underwater without breathing apparatus.

Alas, today this natural balance is rapidly becoming a distant memory. Many of the surviving Haenyeo are over 70, and while they are bathed in the reflected glory of a bygone age, the Korean government is working with the governing body on Jeju to bring through a generation of ecologically aware free divers to keep the fishery alive. The Guardian covered the story here.

These would-be successors face a number of problems: the abundant crops of seaweed on Jeju are no longer as extensive as they used to be, and as the seasons pass, abalone catches continue to decline. Some of the future Haenyeo are concerned because when they listen to the older fishers speak in public about what they do, they leave out details that really matter and paint a misleading picture of what is happening in the once thriving waters off Jeju. This is unfortunate, since the memories of Jejeu’s former glory days have been fed to Unesco by the autonomous province’s government. It was subsequently added to Unesco’s list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, as an object lesson in sustainability. What matters, though, is to break the logjam and get a recovery plan established while there is still a fishery to rescue. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Jeju, there are citizen scientists and environmentalists preparing to channel public goodwill into an NGO that will assess what can be recovered.

A problem the NGO has identified is that although previous generations of Haenyeo may have been aware of the early signs of environmental damage, they lacked the confidence and a scientific framework that would have given weight to their argument. Faced with the prospect of being put down by “real” scientists, not surprisingly, in the past many Haenyeo chose to stay silent.

A 69-year old Haenyeo whose adult daughter has decided to become a citizen scientist was heartbroken to learn that her daughter’s career move would involve becoming a Haenyeo. “I wanted her to have a proper job like joining the civil service,” she told journalists at The Guardian. “We older women don’t want our daughters to be Haenyeo.”

domestication haulage horse lorry
Commercial vehicles by numbers
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The end of the 19th century was a time of profound change for the world’s industrial centres. Without realising the consequences for the future, humankind had started to dismantle relationships with the natural world that went back thousands of years. Progress in the mechanisation of industries that spanned entire continents led to the wholesale dumping of old ways of working: new technology was the answer, now what was the question?

For urban populations, the twentieth century brought a degree of hardship and new expectations. Rural populations faced a different set of challenges, notably how to produce more food with fewer people. Technology could be scaled up, but the results had to be deliverable. The English countryside was filled with agricultural investments in steam tractors. Huge, lumbering engines were trampling the face of the earth. The assumption was that new technology would break down old barriers, bringing with it untold wealth. Technology was declaring war on nature.

There was a pressing need to prove that the country could deliver in every sense of the word. Bringing food into towns faced a number of constraints: neither the carrying power nor the feed requirements for draft animals were extendable. Keeping more horses in built-up areas of Victorian London or any other major city was not an option, while the addition of yet more horses coming into town from the suburbs just increased the volume of dung to manage. On the other side of the channel, Parisians took a very different view of horse dung, regarding it as a measure of commercial success and prestige for the most heavily affected quartiers. On the basis of passing horses alone (who would be so indiscreet as to dream of asking what the passengers might be doing?) the Moulin Rouge and parts of Montmartre were knee-deep in earthly riches.

The graph above gives a 60-year narrative: the first 20 years are significant for present purposes. During the prewar years, Britain was home to about 20 motor manufacturers capable of turning out sturdy tractor units, mid-to-long-range lorries or personnel carriers. By the mid-1930s there were close on 40 such firms, including a handful of US manufacturers running British-based assembly lines to serve the embryonic UK road haulage market. There were commercial variants on existing automobile offerings, such as the 7 cwt Model T Ford delivery van, or the General Motors group with its Bedford and Commer ranges.

Road haulage was so new in those days that commercial vehicles and lorries were in short supply. When vehicle registration started for trucks and vans, there were only 4000 in the country. By 1914 there 18,000. The British economy started to struggle and registered truck numbers dropped. During the hostilities, the War Office bought thousands of specialist vehicles to keep the army moving. Once the war was over, thousands of potential commercial motors were sold off cheaply through army surplus outlets. While researching this post I came across a figure of around 6000 disposals. Since motor manufacturers sold the War Office upwards of 20,000 vehicles collectively, they weren’t complaining. Besides, all these motors transferred their paperwork to Civvy Street.

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One purchase the British Army hung on to was a track-laying tractor bought in 1910. Top brass acquired four Hornsby track-laying tractors to carry out extensive trials in the long-running search for a battlefield heavyweight. They’ve still got one of them at the Tank Museum — and it still runs!

domestication draft animals haulage horse
Leverage for horses
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This diagram from a US army manual issued in 1916 shows the standard loading for a pack animal.

It is time to review how draft animals are connected to their loads. The simplest example would be a pack horse or a mule, in the days when mule trains carried clay to pottery workshops. The Devon clay that was transported this way earned the name of ball clay, since it was shaped into large balls and carried in a double bag carried on the animal’s back, where a saddle might otherwise have gone. Pack animals are often quite light, enabling them to cross rugged terrain, where roads were not available. It is important to keep a regularly updated note of a draft animal’s weight, taking care not to expect them to carry more than 15-20% of their current weight.

Take a half ton horse, hitch it up to loaded lighter, and you’re off!

Carts redistribute a load, but slowing down or stopping can be more demanding, particularly when going downhill. The most efficient means of transport, particularly for heavy consignments such as building supplies, is the canal barge. This can be hauled by a (large) single horse, even when loaded with several tonnes of goods.

domestication horse
Horses by numbers
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Allowing for variations in care, diet and workload, a horse can be expected to live for 20 years. Starting work, a four-year-old has 16 years (80%) of its life ahead of it. For present purposes, we are going to need a notional unit for the work horses can carry out in a year, either as a species or individually. We need to correlate the mass of the animal to the mass of the load, using an average for the species or a more accurate set of measurements for an individual. Assuming that no horse will carry or haul a load greater than its own mass, we can use a percentage variable (load ratio) to represent the work output as a proportion of the mass of horses on the job.

There are two questions to answer at this stage. Firstly, given the aggregate mass of a specific horse population (horses on the job, a weight of n equine tonnes), how many tonnes of product (product tonnes) can be moved in a standard shift (equivalent to one working day)? Assuming an unlimited mountain of product/load to move, we multiply the equine tonnes by the load ratio (which will always be significantly less than 100%) to find a daily work load. The second stage is to turn a daily figure into an annual total, multiplying the daily work load by 365 (days) : let’s call it a “workhorse-year”

Developing a rough and ready measure of how much material a given number of horses can shift can also be inverted to give an idea of how many horses might be needed for a sector of the economy: dividing annual output by the relevant workhorse year. Whatever the sector, the answer is likely to be “too few horses”. The simple fact is that Britain was a net importer of horses for about 30 years, from the moment the Boer war battlefields saw the widespread use of machine guns. This is no coincidence, it is a simply a question of getting bullets into the air faster than the opposition. At about the same time, possibly earlier, the British army organised a Remount Scheme to supply officers with a replacement mount, as needed.

Asia food manufacture
Tofu alert
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Tofu is soya’s answer to cheese: soya milk is cooked and coagulates, producing a range of curds of varying solidity and texture. Like cheese, tofu is a fragile product that requires gentle handling and a clean working environment. Global sales of tofu already top $3 USD billion a year and the market is predicted to grow by between 3% and 5% within the next few years.

This vegetable protein is traded around the world, with a particularly strong market in Asia and the Pacific region. As a rule of thumb, industrialised countries trade mainly in tofu that has been processed to store for longer in food markets which are essentially long haul. This more complex operation has more rigorous technical standards, reflected in the pricing structures. Local markets, notably in Asia and the Pacific, work on a smaller scale with a faster turnround of tofu, often selling a tonne a day, with simpler resources.

One of the ways they can save money in Indonesia is to burn recycling waste: an article in Saturday’s Guardian put the cost of a lorryload of plastic waste at $13 – enough for about two days’ production – compared to firewood at $130 for an equivalent load. Research campaign group Ecoton is working round the clock to establish the levels of pollutants concerned. Ecoton has been active in this area of public health since 1996: last year it published a Brand Audit, identifying the country’s biggest polluters.

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crunchy numbers weights and measures
Data diversity
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For some reason there are times and contexts where we do not accept the idea that there should ever be more than one way of defining an activity or a process. There are innumerable ways of defining the same thing in nature: different life forms will literally see things differently. From the outset, we need to distinguish measurements (in a standard unit) from expressions of quality (descriptive). Providing the unit of measurement is agreed explicitly in advance, there is not a lot to go wrong. This is one of the lessons that the development teams for the Hubble deep space telescope learnt the hard way.

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horse livestock pigs
Horses, pigs and numbers
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The relentless development of machine guns and heavy artillery from the turn of the twentieth century raised the stakes of warfare in previously unimaginable ways. Just as there is a case to argue for a wider interpretation of margins, to reflect a product’s costs and value to the economy, there is also a case to be made for revising the criteria by which these items are judged to be of use. Agriculture brings together a number of inseparable variables just to survive, let alone be profitable, making complex trade-offs on the way. Take animals, for instance.

From conception to weaning successive generations of pigs, producers face a steady pull on their resources. In the case of pigs, there will be little prospect of selling from a new litter until the new arrivals can leave their mothers’ sides and feed independently. Once this milestone has been passed, options will become available for breeders.

Animals that are to be raised for slaughter will have a target slaughter weight, somewhere around 100kg for pigs. Any heavier than that and the earning potential will drop steadily, as more feed is consumed and overheads rise. This brings us to a vital distinction that is easily overlooked. The pig producer will generally earn average money by the standards of the sector if the young animals wean successfully and go on to gain a hundred grams per day for the next six months. The market is front-end loaded and is run like clockwork down to the final 24 hours.

The opposite is true for draft animals, which earn their keep by staying alive and working to whatever age their breed can manage. The lead times are longer, the resources needed are greater and in the early 20th century users like the British army were buying extensively for matched pairs and teams of six and more. It is quite clear that by sending draft animals off to battlefields, their value will be turned into an increasingly expensive remounting cycle of the military’s own making, in which the animals can perish within hours of arriving behind the lines. Even if brood mares are kept away from warfare, the early years of the twentieth century effectively wrote a series of blank cheques for the makers of commercial motors and trucks, to fill the haulage gap caused by modern warfare.