Not more but better – part 4

How could an organic, regenerative food and agriculture system look like?

In this last article in the series, I turn to how a resilient, sustainable food system could look like. I will first discuss the agronomic side of the system and then the socio-economic part. In my view they are just two aspects of the same system. I hope that I made it very clear, from the three previous articles, how intertwined the economic aspects of the system and the ecological aspects are. This is well reflected in the concept of agro-ecology.

To begin with, we need to get out of the commodity perspective of farming. The purpose of agriculture is to produce food, not to make money. Agriculture is also humanity’s main tool for managing the environment. Instead of thinking about agriculture as a system at war with nature, we should think about it as ecological systems, embedded in nature. That has implications for how we should farm. Farming is place-bound and will look very different in different places. Natural farming systems are dynamic and should adapt themselves to the site. We need to ’consult the genius of the place’, in the words of Wes Jackson.

From Earth: Everywhere, painting with soil by Herman de Vries at the Bieannale in Venice 2015, Photo: Gunnar Rundgren

For that reason, I am very sceptical to those that advocate very specific and detailed methods of farming as silver bullets. Those are mostly newly saved converts (be it for permaculture, regenerative agriculture, double-dig, no-dig, biochar, perennial grains, you name it), companies selling a product, or consultants, authors or educators earning a living from teaching the very method they propose. Even worse are those that pretend that they will feed the world with vertical farming, microbial fermentation, meat and other eco-modernist fantasies. They are just fancy and costly dreams with little relevance for a hungry world and despite bold claims they have questionable environmental credentials. Most of them are fishing for public support or venture capital.

The main principles of an organic and regenerative agriculture system are:

Aspiring to have active photosynthesis all year round by living plants.

Diversity (in space, time or both) of crops and animals with different properties.

Recycling of organic matter and nutrients from all parts of the food system, including human excrements.

Integration of livestock and crop production.

Expanded use of biological nitrogen fixation through, among others, the cultivation of leguminous plants. This is not limited to peas and beans for direct human consumption but also clover and alfalfa for forage, the growing of leguminous plants as cover crops or living mulches and leguminous trees in

Avoiding the use of agro-chemicals of all sorts as they disturb or supress natural processes.

Considerable use of permanent, non-fertilized grasslands. This doesn’t necessarily mean expansion of grasslands, but rather better use.*

Use of perennial systems including trees: forest gardens, permaculture, silvopastoral or agroforesty systems. There are many traditional grasslands in Europe that are silvopastoral, such as the semi-natural pastures in Scandinavia and the dehesa of the Iberian peninsula.

It is possible with known technology to farm sustainably and regeneratively, but obviously, innovation can play an important role as it always did.

Animals?

It is a common misunderstanding that animals in agriculture are always wasteful. For sure, industrial animal farming is detrimental to the environment, but so is industrial crop farming. The dichotomy of ‘good’ plants and ‘bad’ animals is just a construct without value. There is certainly a case to integrate livestock in farming systems, just as all natural ecosystems have animals. Good crop rotations with forage (perennial crops such as clover, grass, alfalfa, even trees with edible leaves) and the recirculation of manure maintains or increase soil organic matter and reduces pests and weeds. Through grazing, nutrients are imported from grasslands or other ecosystems. Animals can recirculate nutrients from the food system by eating by-products, low quality human crops and food waste. Small scale raising of pigs and chicken can utilize niches on the farm which have no other productive use. Animals lead to increased bio-diversity, in the soil itself, in the farm and in the landscape. You can find over 300 insect species in cow dung on Canadian pastures. For the farmer, livestock also provides additional income opportunities as well as being a store of wealth. Small scale farming, while it still includes killing animals, has also the potential to develop a more symbiotic relationship between humans and livestock.**

What should we the eat?

The notion that there is one good global diet with largely the same composition is socially, culturally and ecologically inappropriate. On the contrary, the diet should be adapted to what can readily be produced locally. Just as agriculture will look different in different parts of world, diet will as well. For most of human existence that was self-evident. What else could you eat than that produced locally? Only salt and spices were traded before the emergence of empires. Humans have adjusted themselves to all sorts of diets, from an almost carnivorous diet by Inuits to diets with very little animal content (but there has never been a fully vegan food system anywhere in the world). Of course, that doesn’t mean that all diets were perfect. There is almost always something that is suboptimal, but that is certainly the case today as well despite the global food circus.

A radically changed food system will also lead to higher food prices. This in turn will reduce obesity as well as food waste. As there will be a reduction of monocropping of grains and soy beans, there will be much less chicken and pig meat. I also expect an increased consumption of pulses, nuts and root crops while vegetable oils and oil and the more resource-demanding fruit and vegetables (it takes around a kg of fossil gas to produce a kg of pepper in European greenhouses) will be lower.

The socio-economic perspective

There are some society level prerequisites for this kind of system to work. The main such conditions are that food system needs to be relocalized and nutrient cycles ”closed”. There are no fully closed cycles in nature, but any substance of which there is a general shortage will be recycled to a very large extent and only a small proportion will leave the ecosystem. For industrial agriculture the flow of nutrients leaving the fields is very large and almost nothing comes back to the field.

In 1961, the amount of synthetic N, 12Mt, applied to the agriculture soils was almost identical to the amount N in the food of humans. In 2013, 111 Mt of synthetic N was used while only one third of this reached humans. N-fertilizers have changed how we farm, what we farm and what we eat

A circular food economy is nothing new but rather standard practice for centuries, now discarded by the capitalist market-economy. Global flows of nutrients are largely incompatible with the closing of the nutrient cycles. This points to a relocalization of the food system, and ultimately, at least a partial reruralization of societies. The main reason for local food systems is not ecological, however, but rather to reconnect people to the land and have the land as a basis for human society.

In order to reruralize there is a need for land reforms in many countries to ensure that land is more evenly distributed. I leave it open what the desired mix is between household owned and community owned land, or even if ownership at all is the right terminology (there are many more things to consider here, but I leave that for another time)

“Regeneration is also about knowledge and people. We need more people on the land and the whole food sector to manage diversified landscapes and diversified production. I don’t see more people in the fields or in the kitchens as a problem, it is more an opportunity. It makes little sense that only a tiny proportion of the population is involved in natural resource management of all sorts, including agriculture, forestry, fisheries and nature con­servation, while so many are engaged in commerce, industry, services and a mushrooming flora of intermediation. It is ironic that, in an overpopulated world, the countryside is depopulated to the extent that sustainability is threatened.” (Global Eating Disorder).

From transaction to relation

Instead of seeing food as a product or a commodity to be exchanged for money in a market, we need to rethink food. Food is not, and should not, primarily be seen as a commodity to be bought or sold. To a large extent food is an expression of culture, solidarity and connectedness with the land. This also means that food takes the central stage in efforts to transform society. The main path towards true sustainability therefore lies in considerable changes in the market – or even more to develop distribution outside of what is normally called a market.

Increasing self-sufficiency in food and food preparation is one important step in changing our relationship to food. Growing, preserving, preparing, cooking and eating, taking care of the leftovers and waste of our food, gives us control over a bigger share of our lives and at the same time, pulls a big chunk of the real economy out of market, away from competition and from the profit and machinations of corporations as well as the – often well intended, but nevertheless stifling - meddling by governments. Growing, storing and preparing food, cooking and eating together with others is important parts of building a community.

In the end, food is about relations. Relations between humans and nature. We might not think about it, but eating is the most intimate relationship we have with the natural world as we consume other lives into our bodies. We should not, primarily, see this as an act of exploitation but an act of relationship.

Objections?

There is a quite wide-spread opinion that small farms couldn’t feed the world’s population. But that is caused by a mix-up of cost per unit of production and the actual production. Large farms are squeezing smaller farms out of the market because of market access, possibilities for rational specialization, economies of scale, better access to credits or governmental policy distor­tions. This is not because the larger farms have higher revenues or yields per area unit, but because they have lower costs. I discuss this more here.

A similar objection is that it is impossible to feed the world with organic and regenerative agriculture. A regenerative farming system has to generate its productive resources from within the farming system or as an embedded part of adjacent ecosystems; it takes internal energy and resources to supply some of the needed services. Regenerative agriculture cannot use the shortcuts of industrial agri­culture which, by and large, are different versions of fossil fuel.

An obvious example is nitrogen. One can supply the nitrogen that plants need from within the system by increased use of leguminous plants, but that comes at a cost. Symbiotic nitrogen fixation needs energy, energy which the bacteria will get from the plants in exchange for that nitro­gen. Inevitably we will get somewhat lower yields from such a system than when we use fossil fuels to bind nitrogen from the atmosphere. We should also increase the bio-diversity in our farming system in many ways, such as restoring habitats and allow some more weeds, all of which take some space from our primary crops.

It is a realistic assumption that these will never compete on yield alone with a system heavily subsidized by external inputs. But that need not be a big problem as the yields in regenerative organic systems will be greatly increased if we put more resources into research. In addition, the current agriculture system produce a lot more than actually needed, so even a twenty percent reduction in the global yield is not really a big problem. There are many studies showing that while it is challenging it is certainly possible to feed the world with organic agriculture.

Will we have hospitals?

As an individual, one can combine the life of a self-sufficient smallholder with a job (this has basically been my strategy over the years) and to some extent get the best of two worlds. On a system’s level, however, the more people that will be busy with small scale farming, the fewer day jobs there will be. How will the world actually look like; will there be hospitals, will there will be the internet and will there be organic consultants?

The availability of certain labour saving technologies could play a big role in making the work of small and organic farms easier. Think tractor and chain saw (see box). I have a 1970s tractor for farm work, a backhoe loader and a few chain saws (one petrol saw and one battery driven), clearing saws and trimmers as well as two electric pumps for water and a few power tools.

Tractor man speaks 
“We have a 1980 Ford 3600 tractor, delivering 45 horsepower at the PTO. That makes it virtually a toy by modern farming standards (somewhat less so when it was made – farm scale has changed a lot, and fast). Even so, it has astonishing power compared to human work output. A fit and motivated person can reportedly sustain a manual work output of 75W. Forty-five horsepower equates to about 33,500W. So, at the touch of a button, our little tractor gives us about 450 farmworkers.” (Chris Smaje).

The main advantage is not so much that the machinery reduce the back-breaking toil of farming and logging (which they certainly do), but that, using some of these technologies will make it possible to reduce the share of the work of producing food from, say, 75 percent in a fully agrarian and organic** economy to perhaps 20 percent (Serbia has 19%, China 22%). In that way, there would be sufficient capacity for health care systems, plumbing, some industries, telephones and electricity networks, just to mention a few.

Driving tractors, excavators and chain saws require fossil fuels. It is certainly possible, and it would be according to regenerative principles that the farm’s energy needs are supplied by the farm itself. The tractor could be replaced by a team of horses or oxen. There are also possibilities to produce bio fuel on farm, e.g., bio-diesel or ethanol. But that would also require a lot of land to feed the horses or produce the bio fuel, which in turn makes the food equation harder.

I don’t have all the answers about how a future society will look like, and which kinds of technologies that till work. I am suspicious of anybody who present blueprints with any details. Meanwhile, I also don’t think that we should not be too frightened by stories of the misery of our ancestors. They lived in a very different world than ours. First, I believe that in many cases their fate was not as bad as some of the stories make us believe. Second, we need to take into consideration that most smallholders in the world have been oppressed by governments or other mighty powers which have taken most of the surplus, keeping peasants unable to invest in their farms. Third, human knowledge and capacities have progressed a lot which can make a modern smallholder’s life considerably more pleasant than her ancestors’, both in a direct way (e.g. understanding of soil, seed breeding etc.) and indirectly (by nutrition knowledge, health care, hygiene etc.). A modern smallholder society will thus not be the same as a 19^th century society.

* I am a fan of grazing and I am open to improved methods for grazing, but I don’t agree with some of the exaggerated claims that grass-fed beef could constitute the staple food of the current global population. The math simply doesn’t add up. Those that claim that grazing animals can only make a marginal contribution to human nutrition are mistaken. Those that claim that we can feed the global population with grass-fed beef are equally wrong.

** I am aware of that those that have the determined view that killing an animal for food is always wrong, will not be convinced by any such argument.

*** “Organic” in this context means an economy that is essentially built on biological, resource flows and not to any large extent on a large scale extraction of minerals or fossil fuel.