Tag Archive for: Agroecology

Ecological Farming: A Conversation With Fukuoka, Jackson and Mollison

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Published: April, 1987 

Last August, three leaders of the global movement for a natural, permanent agriculture (also called permaculture) gathered at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, for the Second International Permaculture Conference. MOTHER EARTH NEWS was there, too, obtaining the only three-way interview ever with the men our Seasons of the Garden columnists half-playfully labeled “the Holy Trinity” of ecological farming. The following edited discussion is a head-to-head exchange between men who are taking key roles in defining our planet’s future. But first let assistant editor Pat Stone, who conducted the interview, fill you in with some background on the three subjects:

Australian Bill Mollison created the concept of permaculture in ecological farming. A gravel-voiced graybeard, Bill has a dry sense of humor, a feisty temperament, and absolute dedication to his cause. Introduced before his keynote conference speech as “a great yarn teller who’s motivated thousands of people to action,” Mollison has held every job from seaman to Tanzania bush researcher to senior lecturer in environmental psychology. He left that secure university position two years before retirement to blaze the permaculture trail.

To Mollison, permanent agriculture means carefully designed, sustainable systems in which the array, organization, and interactions of plants and animals are the central factors. Perennial plants-especially tree crops-play a large role in his multispecies landscapes. A permaculture system takes much planning, and a good bit of work, to set up, but it should then almost run itself.

Wes Jackson researches perennial crop mixes in Salina, Kansas. A hulking midwesterner with broad hands and a ready smile, Jackson combines a warm nature, down-home humor, and impeccable scientific scholarship (he has a Ph.D. in genetics). For example, his favorite lecture title is “Herbaceous Perennial Seed-Producing Polycultures: Their Contribution to the Solution of All Marital Problems and the End of the Possibility of Nuclear Holocaust.”

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Cyrus Sutton’s “Island Earth” Makes Hawaiian Debut

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Author: Justin Housman | Published: December 5, 2016

Filmmaker/pro surfer Cyrus Sutton has spent the past couple years making “Island Earth,” a documentary chronicling Hawaii’s rural communities as they push back against Big Ag’s experimentation with GMO crops and advanced pesticides, in a battle to retake control over their own food supply. “Island Earth” has its Hawaii premiere tonight at Waihuena Farm, 59-414 Kam Highway, across from OTW. There will be free food and drinks at 6:00pm HAST, the film shows at 6:30 pm, and there’s a Q&A with Sutton and Kauai’s Dustin Barca—who’s become an outspoken activist in the battle against GMOs—following the movie. If you’re on the North Shore, come on out. It’s open to the public.

I talked with Sutton a couple years back when he’d just plunged into the filmmaking process. Here’s what Sutton had to say about the motivation behind “Island Earth” when it was still in its infancy.

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JH: What drew you in about this story and motivated you to make a documentary?

CS: It all started with Korduroy.tv five or six years ago. I founded that website to promote simpler values in our surf culture. Our focuses were taking care of gear, staying healthy, helping our communities, and saving money. Around that time, my friend Loren Luyendyk introduced me to permaculture and regenerative agriculture which are basically methods of sustaining communities without fossil fuels by growing food in balance with natural systems, instead of fighting them with pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

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This Man Is Helping the Entire Country of Bhutan Go Organic

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Author: Clarissa Wei | Published: October 5, 2016

Located on the eastern side of the Himalayas, Bhutan is a tiny country with a population of around 750,000 people. It is known for being one of the happiest nations in the world, and the government puts a heavy emphasis on its unique Gross National Happiness metric, which measures progress through the spiritual, physical, social, and environmental health of its citizens.

It is also the first country in the world on track to becoming 100-percent organic.

For the 14,824-square-mile nation, going entirely organic was not that far of a stretch. The majority of food already comes from small farmers, and agriculture in the country never required much in the way of inputs. It wasn’t until the 1980s when synthetic agro-chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides were introduced that things began to change.

In 2011, the country decided to phase out those chemicals. Their goal: to make the entire country’s agricultural system organic by 2020.

The man behind that transition was Dr. Appachanda Thimmaiah. Thimmaiah is currently the associate professor of sustainable living at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, and from 2008 to 2013 he served as the organic agriculture consultant to Bhutan.

He literally wrote the book on Bhutanese organic certification, so we called him up to talk about his plan for Bhutan and if such a strategy could be applied to the States.

Spoiler alert: The secret is cow piss.

MUNCHIES: So, how did you get invited to Bhutan?
Appachanda Thimmaiah: I have a consultancy company in India. We were the first consultancy company in biodynamic agriculture in India and we were the first to develop large agricultural projects transitioning to organic agriculture. The Bhutanese government wanted to see large successful projects in organic agriculture. I invited them to India and showed them some of my projects and after that, they sent a group of 30 officials from the government to get training for a week. A week training program doesn’t give you the entire experience. Then they were looking for somebody to come help them for organic agriculture development and I was chosen by the ministry of agriculture as a consultant.  It was funded by a couple of NGOs and eventually my work was for two years.

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Mainstreaming Biodiversity to Guarantee Food Security and Nutrition

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 Published: December 2, 2016

Maintaining biological diversity is important for producing food and to conserve the very foundation of life and rural livelihoods, FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo told participants in an international summit aimed at protecting biodiversity.

“Biodiversity is essential for food security and nutrition,” Semedo said at the opening High-Level Segment of the 13thSession of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

“It is needed to sustainably produce nutritious and abundant food and to adapt agriculture, forestry and fisheries to global challenges, such as climate change and growing populations,” she said. “Reducing the ecological footprint of agricultural sectors through sustainable practices will contribute to the conservation of biodiversity.”

She added “maintaining biological diversity in agricultural sectors is important for producing nutritious food, improving rural livelihoods and enhancing the resilience of people and communities.”

“If we want to transform the world, end poverty, reach zero hunger and ensure the lasting protection of biodiversity that humanity and its food systems depend on, then we have to respond through an all-inclusive effort that cuts across sectors and ministries,” she added.

Semedo cited agroecology as “an example of the transformation we need”.

“Agroecology, combining scientific research and local and traditional knowledge, allows the development of sustainable practices and improved knowledge about agricultural ecosystems,” she added.

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Can Agroecology Feed the World and Save the Planet?

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Author:Henrietta Moore | Published on: October 9, 2016

You wouldn’t necessarily know it, but right now Africa is facing a food crisis. With Brexit, global terror attacks, the war in Syria and the seemingly endless string of sporting fixtures vying for our collective attention in 2016 so far, the fact that up to 50 million people across east and Southern Africaare at risk of hunger seems to have largely escaped mention.

The continent has been wracked by drought following one of the strongest ever El Niños. And while a natural phenomenon is the immediate cause, however, Africa’s food security has been undermined over recent decades by the rise of monocropping – the planting of single-crop tracts across vast swathes of scarce arable land.

Starting in the 1960s, the “green revolution” saw industrial farming practices transplanted to poorer nations. In the second half of the 20th century, its success seemed unassailable: the global harvest of maize, wheat and rice trebled from 640 million tonnes in 1961 to almost 1.8 billion tonnes by 2000.

Africa, in particular, embraced new maize varieties with alacrity. Corn now covers up to 70% of some African nations’ farmland and accounts for about 50% of calories consumed by humans.

But the enormous cost to the land and people is now becoming clear. A recent report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) summed up the problem bluntly, stating: “Past agricultural performance is not indicative of future returns”.

The meticulously-researched document concludes that the green revolution’s “quantum leap” in cereal production has come at the price of soil degradation, salinisation of irrigated areas, over-extraction of groundwater and the build-up of pest resistance. Add climate change into the mix and you have a recipe for disaster. While Africa’s population is set to double to 2.4 billion by 2050, the FAO warns that maize yields could fall by nearly 20% over that period.

The problem is affecting not just quantity, but quality. Lack of rotation and over-use of phosphates and nitrates has degraded the nutrient content of the soil, leaving 2 billion people globally suffering micronutrient malnutrition, many in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Resistance Is Fertile: It’s Time to Prioritize Agroecology

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Author: Colin Todhunter | Published on: August 29, 2016

Food is becoming unhealthy and poisoned with chemicals, while diets are becoming less diverse. There is a loss of plant and insect diversity, which threatens food security, soils are being degraded, water tables polluted and depleted and smallholder farmers, so vital to global food production, are being squeezed off their land and out of farming.

Over the last 60 years or so, Washington’s plan has been to restructure indigenous agriculture across the world. And this plan has involved subjugating nations by getting them to rely more on U.S. imports and grow less of their own food. Agriculture and food production and distribution have become globalized and tied to an international system of trade based on export-oriented mono-cropping, commodity production for the international market, indebtedness to international financial institutions (IMF/World Bank) and the need for nations to boost foreign exchange (U.S. dollar) reserves to repay debt.

This has resulted in food surplus and food deficit areas, of which the latter have become dependent on agricultural imports and strings-attached aid. Food deficits in the global South mirror food surpluses in the West.

Whether through IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs, as occurred in Africa, trade agreements like NAFTA and its impact on Mexico or, more generally, deregulated global trade rules, the outcome has been similar: the devastation of traditional, indigenous agriculture.

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5 Food Systems Lessons the U.S. Can Learn from Africa

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Author: Jennifer Lentfer| Published on: September 7, 2016

A recipient of the 2016 Food Sovereignty Prize from Ethiopia shares his insights on food and farming in the U.S., threats to smallholder farmers in Africa, and communicating across ideological differences.

As food activists work to localize food systems in the United States, small farmers who sell their food locally still produce around 80 percent of the food in sub-Saharan Africa. But that does not mean that farmers and food activists on the African continent can be complacent. Quite the opposite. Corporate industrialization of African agriculture is resulting in massive land grabs, destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems, displacement of indigenous peoples, and destruction of livelihoods and cultures.

Yonas Yimer works to create a united voice for food justice across more than 50 countries in Africa. He leads communications for the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a policy advocacy group that fights to protect small family farming and community-based food production, and is a recent recipient of the 2016 Food Sovereignty Prize.

Despite the recurring argument that a “green revolution” is needed to feed Africa’s growing population, Yimer says, “we’re here to say that agroecology already feeds Africa.” He describes agroecology as a set of practices that integrates scientific understanding about how particular places work—their ecology—with farmers’ knowledge of how to make their local landscapes useful to humans.

Agroecology also encourages people to think about their own relationship to land, to the ecosystem, and with other people. We sat down with Yimer during his recent visit to San Francisco to talk about what we in the U.S. can learn from the wealth of knowledge that exists within African communities about how to defend and build upon sustainable and indigenous approaches to growing food. Here are the five key lessons that emerged.

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What Would It Take to Mainstream ‘Alternative’ Agriculture?

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Author: Maywa Montenegro, Alastair Iles | Published on: August 26, 2016

Editor’s note: This Voices piece is published in collaboration with the academic journal Elementa. It is based on “Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology,” a peer-reviewed article published July 20 as part of Elementa’s New Pathways to Sustainability in Agroecological Systems forum.

The industrialized food system, studies have shown, is linked to greenhouse gas emissions, algal blooms, pesticide pollution, soil erosion and biodiversity loss, to name a few ecological troubles. Add to this a long list of social ills, from escalating rates of obesity to the demise of the family farmer and deadening of rural landscapes and rural economies across much of the U.S.

In 2010, the National Academies of Science updated its seminal 1989 publication “Alternative Agriculture” with a fresh look at the state of food and farming in America. Its expert panel concluded, “Growing awareness of unintended impacts associated with some agricultural production practices has led to heightened societal expectations for improved environmental, community, labor, and animal welfare standards in agriculture.”

Yet that growing awareness and those heightened expectations haven’t led to alternative agricultural systems becoming the norm in the U.S. Organic has made some headway, but many organic growers have been forced to imitate industrial farming: grow bigger, resort to monocultures instead of truly diversified fields, and sell to large supermarkets — forgoing many of the benefits alternative agricultural systems offer, such as natural pest control, pollination from native bees, and a smaller production scale conducive to family farmers and local food economies.

So, what gives industrialized agriculture such staying power despite its adverse impacts, even as alternatives offer such benefits? And how can more wholesome food production methods such as agroecology become conventional instead of alternative? To achieve real change in how food is produced and eaten, we need to change people’s expectations of what “normal” agriculture should look like.

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Permaculture for Agroecology: Design, Movement, Practice, and Worldview. A Review

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Author: Rafter Sass Ferguson and Sarah Taylor Lovell | Published on: October 25, 2013

Agroecology is a promising alternative to industrial agriculture, with the potential to avoid the negative social and ecological consequences of input-intensive production. Transitioning to agroecological production is, however, a complex project that requires diverse contributions from the outside of scientific institutions. Agroecologists therefore collaborate with traditional producers and agroecological movements. Permaculture is one such agroecological movement, with a broad international distribution and a unique approach to system design. Despite a high public profile, permaculture has remained relatively isolated from scientific research. Though the potential contribution of permaculture to agroecological transition is great, it is limited by this isolation from science, as well as from oversimplifying claims, and the lack of a clear definition. Here, we review scientific and popular permaculture literature. A systematic review discusses quantitative bibliometric data, including keyword analysis. A qualitative review identifies and assesses major themes, proposals, and claims. The manuscript follows a stratified definition of permaculture as design system, best practice framework, worldview, and movement. The major points of our analysis are as follows: (1) Principles and topics largely complement and even extend principles and topics found in the agroecological literature. (2) Distinctive approaches to perennial polyculture, water management, and the importance of agroecosystem configuration exceed what is documented in the scientific literature and thus suggest promising avenues of inquiry. (3) Discussions of practice consistently underplay the complexity, challenges, and risks that producers face in developing diversified and integrated production systems. (4) The movement is mobilizing diverse forms of social support for sustainability, in geographically diverse locations. (5) And scholarship in permaculture has always been a diverse marginal sector, but is growing.

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Organic Farming Could Feed The World, If Only We Would Let It

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Author: Joseph Erbentraut

When it comes to organic farming, many in the agricultural industry are on board in theory, if not in practice. And that’s largely because of low crop yields.

For many years, the prevailing perception has been that organic farming — which avoids synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, antibiotics and GMOs, and aims to preserve natural resources and biodiversity — cannot produce the sort of yields needed to provide food for the world’s population.

While a new report from researchers at the Friends of the Earth admits that crop yields are, on average, currently smaller with organic farming than industrial farming, that doesn’t have to be the case.

The report, released Tuesday by the D.C.-based environmental advocacy group, goes on to argue that crop yields shouldn’t be the only metric by which we should evaluate any given crop’s success.

In a conference call Tuesday, John Reganold, a professor of soil science and agroecology at Washington State University, said a crop’s yield is just one of four metrics by which it should be considered sustainably productive.

Equally important, he argued, is whether a crop is environmentally safe, economically viable to the farmer and socially responsible — by paying its workers well, for example.

“For any farm to be sustainable, it must meet each and every one of these four sustainability criteria,” Reganold said by phone Tuesday.

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