Vegan Agriculture

The town centres of Warwick and Leamington Spa lie approximately three miles (five kilometres) apart and are linked by two main roads, Emscote Road (the A445) to the north and Myton Road (the A425) to the south; it was from the latter of these that I took the photographs for the Commonwealth Games cycle road race, shown on a previous blog post.  The Grand Union Canal, on its route from Birmingham to London passes under both of these roads in a direction running roughly north-west to south-east; whilst between these roads it passes over, via an aqueduct, the River Avon and the railway line that connects the two towns.  From south of the River Avon the canal forms the official boundary between the two towns for a stretch of maybe about a mile.

Via ribbon development along each of the main roads, followed by housing estates being built off them the two towns merged into each other several decades ago; whilst the towns themselves have continued to expand outwards forming a contiguous urban / suburban sprawl of more than a hundred thousand people.  Over the past five years there have large scale housing developments built immediately to the south of both towns, with thousands of dwellings built on what was until recently arable farmland.  Thousands more dwellings are planned, that will destroy even more of that farmland.  This is an ecocidal policy as it means that with more people resident in the local conurbation and less local farmland, food needs to transported further.  This problem is not unique to Warwick & Leamington, it is happening to a large degree all over England.  (Even prior to the Spring 2020 Lockdown, there was plenty of empty office and retail space that could have been converted for housing and now there is more of each).

In the middle of this conurbation and straddling each side of the canal (with its own bridge across it) lies Jephson’s Farm, shown on the somewhat pastoral scene above as viewed from the canal towpath where it runs along the top of the aqueduct.  As I took this photograph just over three years ago, then the sheep shown on it will long since have been slaughtered for consumption, their skins and their wool will have been used for clothing, the collagen from their joints for cosmetics and any other parts of their corpses that could be ulilised will have been.  Some ‘environmentally conscious’ meat-eaters may see this as a ‘sustainable’ use of a resource; and from the views of the farm the sheep are grass-fed, though I don’t know what other feed that they may be given.

Farmers are currently being incentivised by the British government to get out of farming and many ‘awake’ people have linked this to Agenda 2030.  Many meat-eaters, paranoid about the growth of the market for ‘plant-based’ processed foods, believe that ‘they don’t want us eating meat’; ‘they’ being the World Economic Forum.  It would be more accurate to say that ‘they’ don’t want us eating any food that is the result of agriculture rather than a laboratory, followed by a factory.  The meat-eaters ignore how many animal-derived processed foods have long been on the market and that the ‘plant-based’ varieties are still far fewer.  They also ignore that most meat is packaged in a factory of some form to be sold as such, cellophane wrapped in supermarkets (an issue that PETA has highlighted in one of its few sensible forms of protest).

But returning the subject of this specific farm, on the numerous times that I have walked along that stretch of the canal towpath, I have wondered, well what if it weren’t there?  Would it have been built upon by now?  Some of it may well have been, whilst some may have been set aside as part of a ‘green’ corridor that links both towns along the path of the Avon and its tributary the Leam, which flows into the Avon a short distance upriver from the aqueduct.  If the owner of this farm were to take an offer to sell up, I would hope that the land would not get built upon, as it is nice to experience a little bit of countryside in an otherwise distinctly urbanised area (there being a Tesco Superstore and a McDonald’s just before the canal reaches Emscote Road to the north).  For this farm, as with any others with animal-based agriculture the obvious answer would be to cultivate the land with crops.

As I put on a blog post last November, growing soya or other crops, should the land be suitable, could feed more people.  Even if the land were not kept as a single farm, it could be divided into allotments to allow people to grow their own crops.  On the blog post that I recently did about the Leamington Eco Fest, Canalside Community Food, a community-supported agriculture scheme, located the other side of Leamington, has a long waiting list to join, so this would be an ideal place to start a similar project, coincidentally right by the same canal.  Obviously, my thoughts have focused on this particular farm as an ideal location for locally-produced crops.  It may not come on the market anytime in the foreseeable future but there may be other local ones that do.

More the point, if you are a vegan, wherever you happen to live, keep a lookout for any farmland that comes up for sale and think about how you could maybe form a group of likeminded people to purchase it.  Bearing in mind that not many of us will not have sufficient finance to do so on our own.  Ignore the paranoia of meat-eaters, whilst recognising it is essential that crop-growing must be maintained in preference to laboratory-engineered processed ‘food’.  This is a genuine form of sustainability and doesn’t need a globalist agenda to dictate it.  Mainstream food supply will soon become contaminated with gene-edited and genetically modified crops, so the more of your own that you can grow the better.

Although this is not intended as a ‘Travel’ article, so I have not categorised it as such, if you were on the aqueduct looking roughly north-east, hence upriver along the Avon it forms the postal boundary between the two towns; upriver then passing under the A445 it continues to form that boundary.  The ‘green’ corridor itself as mentioned runs west to east from St Nicholas Park, Warwick, along the north side of the Avon (note that part of this can get quite muddy following wet weather), then under the aqueduct, to some steps which will then take you up to the towpath.  If you click on this link, you will find a map.  Following the towpath south-eastwards toward the A425 but not as far as it, there is a narrow footpath leading eastwards towards Leamington (to begin with you will will see the rail line connecting the two towns on your right down an embankment), that will eventually bring you out at the weir by Princes Drive.  Crossing the main road here will bring you into Victoria Park, under the rail viaduct, past the skatepark towards the bowling greens, walking along the south side of the Leam.  There is then a pedestrian tunnel to a footpath by a green area.  This leads towards a footbridge across the Leam into Pump Room Gardens, the site of the Eco Fest.