Conventional Agriculture

In a sustainable system of agriculture (the Dream Farm is close to such an ideal[1]), the waste from one process is the input for another process, with the whole system composed of many coupled cycles of CLOSED loops feeding on one another, and carbon intake and output is balanced just as other nutrients. The more complex and overlaid the structure, meaning, the more process- and bio-diversity, the more robust is the system, in the same principle as biodiversity is for ecosystem stability and resilience. As biophysicist Mae-wan Ho concluded from lessons learned from studying the energy flows that sustains living organisms themselves, puts it, our current economic model is one that sucks in resources and spews out waste along its path of destruction that spirals out of control, depleting both the resources and the sink capacities of our planet. To survive, we must learn to close the loops of all processes, and that is what sustainability means.

Conventional, modern agriculture is unsustainable and climate damaging in many ways[2]. Fossil fuel is converted to fertilizers, and transported around the world to be applied to soil, acidifying the soil and damaging the microbial community that is an essential component of a healthy soil ecosystem. Continued use of synthetic fertilizers instead of natural organic waste leads to the depletion of micronutrients and minerals, with startling decrease in food mineral content worldwide over the past 100 years[3]. Crops harvested are transported over long distances, mostly to feed livestocks that convert only a small fraction of the energy input of the crops into animal products. The waste from animals in factory feedlots are not returned to soil to replenish its health and carbon content, but instead accumulates in mountains of manure that are potent sources of greenhouse gases such as methane (25X stronger than CO2). Meanwhile starved soil microflora die off and release their carbon content, thinning the soil and leading to erosion. About 4 tons of erosing soil is going down the river annually per human alive today All this is further maligned by the copious use of genetically modified crop varieties, coupled with intensive application of chemical pesticides/herbicides (many are neutral toxins), that these GMO crops are able to withstand.

Instead, the organic, “sustainable agriculture” practices are much closer to what’s needed, but with important deficiencies. In his article “A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change”, Allan Savory, founder of the Holistic Management system, and recipient of the 2003 Australian International Banksia Award for the person or organization doing the most for the environment on a global scale, wrote:

“We need a new form of agriculture close to today’s organic cropping practices that can provide easily harvestable and transportable excesses to feed urban populations. The new agriculture will need to be truly holistic in that it mimics nature and restores soil health—keeping soils permanently covered with cropping practices more akin to nature’s polyculture complexity than today’s single-crop fields that leave the soil bare between plants and rows and, in many cases, over the entire non-growing season.”

In the framework of the Holistic Soil Management system, one works with nature to allow the natural relationships among plants, soil microorganisms (including bacteria, fungi and protozoans), insects, and surface animals to operate in harmony, that not only sustains each of these life forms and the human keepers, but also increases soil nutrient content and total soil organic matter (leading to carbon sequestration), as well as water holding capacity. In other words, the soil becomes more teeming with life.

Perhaps the most remarkable successes of the holistic management system come from their profound understanding of the causes of ongoing degradation of the world’s 4.5 billion hectares of rangelands, that is radically different from the “conventional wisdom” that has led to practices that resulted in at least 3 quarters of these to be degraded. By implementing grazing practices that imitate nature, the holistic management system has successfully restored soil health and soil carbon content on millions of hectors of previously degraded rangeland across three continents.

It is estimated that, by increasing soil carbon content just 0.5% on the 3 quarters of degraded rangelands in the world, (and 0.5% increase is considered very achievable), 150 gigatons of carbon can be sequestered in less than 15 years, roughly reducing atmospheric CO2 concentration by 75 ppm!

Exactly how do they do that? Here is a summary: (for more information please read Allan Savory’s article)

First they recognized that the traditional burning of biomass on rangelands as a way of clearing old, stale leaves and inducing sprouting regrowth, is actually damaging the soil by exposing it to sunlight and drying up, reducing water and organic matter, releasing huge amounts of carbon into the air, impairing the subsequent growth of plants, and when the rains return they are less effective (less soaks in and more evaporates or runs off) as desertification increases.

They also recognized that, before humans hunted off large herds of herbivores that used to graze on these rangelands, these grazers were doing the job of what humans later tried to do with fire – but without the ill effects of fire. It turns out that whatever these wild, large concentrated herds did not consume, they trampled onto the ground, thus removing the old growth and preparing both plants and soils for new growth.

Savory observed decades ago as a young wildlife biologist in his native Zimbabwe, that where there were large populations of grazing herbivores and other game, complete with packs of predators that followed closely and kept the herds bunched, the soil and vegetation was healthiest. Later he discovered that high density intensive grazing (not overgrazing but much denser than prevailing practices), coupled with good timing of herd movement (by predators in nature, or by humans in holistic farming practices), was the key to maintaining the optimal conditions of the soil, with the dung left behind by the herds quickly buried by rich populations of dung beetles, which not only allows nutrients and organic matter in the dung to be retained by the soil, nourishing the entire soil ecosystem including the very grass the herds grazed on, but also avoids the emission of methane into the atmosphere (methane-oxidising bacteria in the soil takes care of the problem).

Therefore, by observing natural settings and mimicking them, thereby allowing grazers, dung beetles, soil bacteria, soil fungi mycelium and plants to live on each other and complement each other, they successfully boosted soil organic matter content, recovered severely degraded range lands, improved water storage and availability, improved drought and flood resistance, and reversed desertification. What they accomplished was precisely to allow the cycles of interconnected living and biochemical processes to close the loop, to be coupled with one another in a complex web of sustainable ecosystem, just as described by Ho’s concept.

[1] Mae-Wan Ho (2008). The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms. World Scientific. pp. 97-108. ISBN-13 9789812832603

[2] See a great resource here: http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=643

[3] Marin Hum, “Soil mineral depletion”, in Optimum nutrition, Vol. 19, No. 3, Autumn 2006. And other references cited in [2]

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