Continued from: AGRICULTURE ...the correct way #4
Salatin says a hundred cows naturally produce $2,500 worth of NPK-laden manure over a short Virginia winter. The old Green Revolution paradigm ignores the fact that, "Buying calves generates fertilizer. Selling hay depletes the soil"5 Salatin is talking about the carbon cycle, one that is as important to food production as the water cycle. Every living thing is carbon based and, when it dies, is supposed to return what it has borrowed back to the Earth to nourish more life. Manure is simply dead plant life returning to the soil. When we interrupt that cycle, as we do by ignoring the organic, carbon content of soils and interrupting normal biodiversity decay, we are destroying the entire fertility process.
Abe Collins is another farmer who has learned to study the science of reality, not of agribusiness. When he and partner Ted Yandow of Swanton, Vermont, realized what their grain-fed dairy operation was doing to natural cycles, they changed to grass feeding. They saw themselves "creating a positive effect on climate change" using "permaculture" methods—perennial agricultural systems designed to mimic the relationships found in nature. As Abe told a PBS series called Regeneration in 2007, "Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has broken the carbon cycle," Soils don't need just NPK. "We have the water cycle and the dynamics between communities [of life]. We have the flow of sunshine through plants into the food web. If any one of these breaks, the whole system breaks... Carbon exists in the soil as fertility, and we've put it in the atmosphere, so we have too much C02 up there and not enough organic carbon down here, in the soil." When dead plants are not returned to where they grew, fertility is destroyed and the carbon is released into the atmosphere instead of sequestered in the ground.
Of all the people talking about the challenge of global warming and the frightening chemical changes burning carbon has wreaked in our atmosphere and oceans, permaculturists like Abe Collins are the most optimistic about what we can do to correct our mistakes. Collins says that if we stop plowing and start raising our food by permaculture methods, even partly, we can recover our atmosphere and water as well. "If you want to increase soil carbon," that is, if we want to get the carbon we've released as fossil fuels back under the ground, Collins says, "you have to have covered soil." That means avoiding plowing, ripping up the root-based nutrients and exposing bare soil to air, where it will release carbon. "That's the number one condition... Decaying organic matter and living plants. Perennial grasslands are this incredible way to maintain that soil cover... . [and] the fastest way to build soil carbon that we know of."46
A survey conducted in Central America to measure the effects of Hurricane Mitch, a devastating weather event that hit in 1998, supports what Collins says. Researchers discovered that "farmers using diversification practices such as cover crops, intercropping, and agroforestry suffered less damage than their conventional neighbours using monocultures" because their soils were in better shape and could continue to sequester carbon to nourish the next crop. The study covered 360 communities in three countries. "It was found that sustainable plots had 20 to 40 percent more topsoil, greater soil moisture and less erosion and experienced lower economic losses than their conventional neighbors."47
Abe Collins points out that when Allan Savory first set up grazing procedures that help farmers keep their land "covered," the people doing it might "triple or quadruple their livestock numbers [above what Savory advised, or] maybe they'd get divorced or would buy too many things with the new money they made—things would fall apart." So, Savory came up with the principles of Holistic Management. One reason his system is not as enthusiastically championed by some of the scientists who are in agreement with the soil principles on which it rests is that Holistic Management is not just science. It's an ethical and cultural commitment. It forces managers who sign on to it to accept a wide array of principles, and they must employ "the entire equation: land, in terms of the ecosystem processes; people; and money; they all have to fit—every time they make a decision." Addressing this "entire equation" will benefit us all in the future.
THE KNOWLEDGE GROWTH SPIRAL
Lewis Grant farms 2,500 acres in northern Colorado. He has not used pesticides since 1985:
yields are consistently within the top 10 percent of yields in the state [His six-year rotation includes] some combination of millet, sunflowers, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, beans, and hay. This constantly shifting vegetative landscape keeps disease and pest populations in check... For fertilizer, Grant uses both cow manure and cover crops... When the Russian wheat aphid devastated wheat crops throughout the area, yields on his organic farms were not affected.
Sandra Steingraber, biologist48
Claude William Genest, the host of the PBS series Abe Collins appeared in, was teaching permaculture at the University of Vermont in 2007. He likes to point out that the last 150 years or so have been the anomaly in terms of agriculture; before that all food-growing was organic and regional and had to take into account such factors as rainwater conservation and the carbon cycle, simply in order to survive. So it shouldn't be too hard to board that old train, this time armed with a lot of new knowledge, technologies, and tools. Permaculture is just one of many food-producing concepts that are being developed into new systems of food production around the world. It favors using natural ecosystems to grow perennials that also produce foods and products—like a modern version of traditional agroforestry.
It means that if you live in an area like southern Quebec, which evolved as forest mixed with open clearings that naturally produce and support berries, nuts, fruits, grasses, deer, rabbits, birds, and various insects, you would take advantage of that and use Abe Collins's "covered ground" concept to plant a permaculture "farm" of nut, maple, and fruit trees, interwoven with grapes, some grasses for a modest number of grazing animals, and edible perennials like borage and other greens. Permaculture operations would keep the ground covered and the carbon working to produce food, not leaking out into the atmosphere or exported as virtual soil and lost to the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen cycle. Permaculture is particularly concerned with water, how it naturally moves across a landscape and how it can be used to maximize that landscape's production. It employs simple earthworks reminiscent of the traditional bunds, za'is, and cordonspierreux mentioned earlier. Where water naturally collects, a contour ditch or swale can concentrate and hold it, catching nutrients to build a productive grove of berry-yielding shrubs or hazelnuts, also directing some of the water to a little crop of squash. Permaculture also focuses on building and road design so that the whole farm can conserve resources; but one drawback of permaculture is that proponents have been quite enthusiastic about introducing exotics—kiwis and goji berries to Quebec, eucalyptus to Africa—a practice that has led to some disasters. This part of that movement veers away from our sustainability criteria of making sure the activity fits in with the local ecosystem. The thing that's really important to recognize is that raising food this way, keeping the carbon cycle intact, is not new to humans. It took a long time for researchers to realize it, but traditional agroforestry, of which permaculture is just a recent branch, has supported large populations for centuries. There is now archeological evidence that the Haude nosaunee villages of upstate New York, for example, were not only surrounded by many square miles of corn fields but by forests that had been essentially turned into orchards. As many as one out of every four trees produced a sweet, soft-shelled native chestnut, and the mast from these trees, and the hickories, oaks, beeches, butternuts, hazelnuts, and walnuts that were also favored, attracted game of all kinds and provided flours and delicious nut creams for a human population that reached the hundreds of thousands. "Within- a few centuries," Charles Mann writes in his celebrated book on pre-contact native life, 1491, "the Indians of the eastern forest reconfigured much of their landscape from a patchwork game park to a mix of farmland and orchards. Enough forest was left to allow for hunting... The result was a new 'balance of nature,"' so successful that the Europeans didn't recognize it. And if people could attain a balance before, we can do it again.49
There are many more developments in farming that combine organics, permaculture, and techniques such as integrated pest management (ipm), which uses plants to repel or attract pests. For example, in order, to control the invasive vine Striga, a parasite that poisons and strangles corn plants, scientists interplant corn with molasses grass (Melinis minutiflord) and silverleaf (Desmodium uncinatum). They crowd out the Striga and produce cattle fodder, while repelling corn-boring ticks and fixing nitrogen! Meanwhile, other wild grasses that host corn-borers are planted nearby to attract that pest. Turning the field back into something of a natural polyculture gives farmers a 130 percent profit on their investment, as compared with-less than 10 percent when they monoculture.50
An especially exciting fact about permaculture, organics, IPM, and polycropping is that in the process of producing pure foods and other products, these agricultural techniques are proven to sequester carbon and foster biodiversity. These largely organic systems' avoid practices that poison and kill competing species. Local vegetation is left to grow and wetlands are preserved, not just to raise fish for food but also to share with frogs, nesting ducks, and all the wigglies down in the mud. These methodologies respect agricultural and natural biodiversity. That is the ultimate test of whether we are helping to destroy or to support the biosphere.
Another defining feature of the new agriculture is that it's designed for smallholdings and isn't pushed by a vested interest like the petrochemical industry. It's a grassroots, spontaneous movement with a million heads thinking about how to achieve the same, universally desirable goal: good, nutritious, sustainable food. Yacouba Sawadogo, planting his hundreds of thousands of trees in the blazing sun of the Sahel, never heard about the permaculture principles that are so similar to his own. Prominent academics like E. Ann Clark may admire innovators like Joel Salatin without knowing he is a member of the Holistic Management movement. Allan Savory had never heard of Slow Food when he was developing Holistic Management, and although Carlo Petrini has surely met Michael Pollan, neither one knows Will Allen at Growing Power. And yet all their'goals, principles, tools, and results are almost identical.
Today, farmers, consumers, and others concerned about agriculture—including the high-level academic contributors to the all-important iaastd report and the government officials listening to rural input in forums like Quebec's Commission on the Future of Agriculture—have begun to separate cultural prejudices from real' science and find what actually works. We've had to learn some hard lessons from the past to get going in the right direction, but the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. It looks like we're finally learning how to bake a sustainable one.
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AND THAT IS THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER ON HOW WE SHOULD BE DOING OUR AGRICULTURE ALL OVER THE WORLD. IF WE DO NOT WE ARE IN FOR BIG TROUBLES DOWN THE ROAD, NOT THE LEAST WILL BE OUR BAD HEALTH, HENCE THE COST OF HEALTH CARE WILL GO THROUGH THE ROOF; THE PROBLEMS WILL COMPOUND UNTIL WE LEARN THAT THE WAY AGRICULTURE WAS DONE IN THE PAST, BEFORE "THE FAST BUCK" MENTALITY CAME, WAS THE CORRECT WAY.
KEITH HUNT
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