Feeding the world sustainably demands new approach to farming and food

Calls mount for shift from commodity outlook to organic, community orientation.

By Greg Bowman

The commodity agriculture model has evolved to require staple grain crops to be grown as efficiently as possible in one place for export to the highest buyer outside the country. This approach has too often made farming into an industrial process while rendering the role of feeding the cultivated land’s people into a virtual afterthought. Political leaders, researchers and grassroots agricultural organizations are increasingly in agreement that transition to more organic farming methods that target feeding their home areas first will build stronger, safer and ultimately more prosperous countries.

Six years ago, African leaders agreed to an initiative1 to focus agriculture-based development to end hunger, reduce poverty and food insecurity along with increasing opportunities for export. Results have been minimal and measures imprecise, but the goals are in place.

In contemporary research that factors in human health, ecological restoration, environmental responsibility and sustainability tied to current solar power, the current yield-focused conventional farming practices come up short. Dramatic price dips for crude oil notwithstanding, fossil fuels are no longer a sustainable foundation for food production. 2

Compared with biologically based systems of crop and livestock production, input-dependent systems that demand purchases of off-farm products every year simply can’t adequately feed people—or profit farmers or protect water and soil quality—in more and more areas of the world.

Community village gardens are typical where there is a common water source, providing food and marketable crops for many families. Improving soil organically improves drought tolerance, costs less than purchased inputs and improves nutritional density of food crops.

Discounted until recently as a viable approach to food sufficiency, regenerative organic systems are infinitely adaptable across the globe. They combine local wisdom, cultural strengths and advanced biological techniques to carefully utilize local and on-farm resources. These systems are uniquely able to withstand the pressure of diminishing fossil fuel supplies, costly synthetic inputs and patent-controlled genetics while actually fighting climate change through increasing soil organic matter over time.

Start with the basics

The fact is, no one knows what’s really possible if trade, development and research were concentrated on meeting each nation’s food needs through organic agriculture grown as locally as is practical. Maybe Colin Tudge is right when he says “Feeding people is easy.” In an essay on his book of the same name, the English science writer says the world’s communities could easily feed themselves, well, if feeding people were the well-crafted focus of international land-use and agricultural management—rather than an incidental aspect of the industrial food system.

Key points, he says, would be to:

• Raise staple crops (cereals, pulses, nuts and tubers) for basic energy and protein. Use prime farmland for high-value horticultural crops of fruit and vegetables.

• Fit in livestock where cows can have grass in meadows and where hogs and chickens can be fed largely on surpluses and leftovers.

• And basically fit mixed-enterprise farming to the land and climate with an eye for optimizing food value in sustainable ways.

“In general,” Tudge says, “Farms should be mixed and must therefore be labour intensive—because well-balanced farms are complex and need very high standards of husbandry.”

Mixed gardens–-here incorporating vegetables and papaya trees—use biodiversity, height differential, shade and different levels of soil and above-ground space to improve productive capacity in natural systems. This family plot provides food and marketable onions, which carry a high price tag close to holidays in central Senegal.

He says farming that we need is Enlightened Agriculture, based on sound biology and common sense. Raising food in this way, making the best of land for producing the nutrients that humans need most would have us eating “plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety,” Tudge says in an essay from May, 2007.

Well, if not easy, then at least easier when the food economy is re-oriented to do two things:

1. Better accommodate the need for healthy subsistence for everyone (increasing demand for fresh, seasonal, nutrient-dense and diverse crops)
2. Bring the true cost of input-intensive and ecologically risky foods to the marketplace (bringing some pricing equity to meat produced humanely on pasture v. in factory-farmed confinement settings).

"How ironic that we must ask our policymakers to make the nutritional health and well-being of their people a nation's first agricultural priority,” said Mark Winne, author of "Closing the Food Gap,” www.markwinne.com when asked this week about the fastest way to get a “sustainable food first” shift going in the United States. (See sidebar story for his proposal for the U.S.)

Policy changes backed by new commitments to meet basic food needs in sustainable ways can have a huge impact on land use wherever food is grown in food-insecure areas. “Preservation of the biodiversity and other natural resources is a prerequisite for the long-term food security and the eradication of poverty in developing countries,” said Amadou Makhtar Diop, international director at the Rodale Institute, reflecting on his many years of work with African agricultural development.

Especially from work in his native Senegal, Diop is convinced that, “Integrated crop-livestock systems reduce risk, contribute to the sustainability of smallholder farmers, improve diet through addition of protein, increase income opportunities and contribute to the restoration of soil organic matter.”

Clinton: Food not a commodity

Speaking in October on World Food Day, former U.S. President Bill Clinton said today's global food crisis shows "we all blew it, including me when I was president," by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world's poor. He said that over the long term, only agricultural self-sufficiency could take a significant bite out of world hunger and stave off future financial woes.

“We should go back to a policy of maximum agricultural self-sufficiency,” Clinton said. While there would always be a global market for crops like rice, wheat and corn, he added, “it is crazy for us to think we can develop a lot of these countries where I work without increasing their capacity to feed themselves and treating food like it was a color television set.”

This recently purchased feeder calf, raised in a roaming herd, is ready for fattening in confinement. Keeping meat cattle in pens greatly reduces over-grazing and allows collection of manure for composting.

His recommendations were hardly radical, except in their embrace of common sense. He called for an increase in fair-trade provisions, direct-marketing arrangements and other policies designed to level the playing field between agricultural producers in developed countries and the mostly small farmers who are responsible for the lion’s share of worldwide food production.

That’s the “what” side of the equation, the “quit stacking the deck against food security” part. The “how” part looks something like this, as outlined recently by Katharine Koon:

• Encourage biodiversity, intensive management and the skilful integration of crop and livestock enterprises that can bring cascading levels of benefits to families with even a small amount of land. Consider these benefits to the 750 million people subsisting on less than $1 a day living in rural areas of the rural global South. This population depends on smallholder farming, selling labor, or a combination of the two.
• By developing these household farms close to home, the farmer—usually a woman—can more easily manage her childcare and cooking duties. This improves childhood nutrition, proper development of children and the likelihood that children—particularly girls—will stay in school.
• By focusing first on optimizing the nutritional value of food crops, family health improves.
• Food raised without external inputs decreases the need for the farmer to work for wages (especially low-paid for women) off the farm to pay for basic food and every-season agricultural inputs.
• Polyculture farms provide multiple species of micro-nutrient-rich plant and animal food.

Finding the ways that can help communities to feed themselves includes what happens in the field, but also what those field practices mean beyond the field edge, as well. Regenerative organic systems—built on natural systems that improve soil organic matter and biodiversity—bring improvements for the farming families, their neighbors, their watershed, their overall community health and the amount of entrepreneurial freedom they have to grow their most sustainable crops in volumes that give them enough to sell to their community and beyond.

Making “cut and carry” hay from native grass. Grass and specific fodder (forage) crops grown in “feed gardens” are improved by mixing them with leguminous trees, which provide increased nitrogen captured from the air through the work of compatible soil bacteria interacting with the legume-crop roots.

These soil-based improvements are documented in Rodale Institute research results, which show carbon sequestration (trapping) of up to 2,000 pounds of carbon per acre per year—far better than no-till using conventional fertilizer and weed-killers. Since it began improving its soils more than 30 years ago, staff has never used synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides or fungicides. Further, the Institute—in accordance with the USDA’s National Organic Program—uses no Genetically Modified (GM) crops in its organic fields.

GM crops not the answer

Despite a recent flurry of suggestions that 2008’s critically low global food reserves demand even greater use of GM crops, these input-dependent and farmer-unfriendly varieties actually lock in an extreme version of conventional farming. Bred to survive herbicides that kill everything else in the field—or perhaps to produce their own version of a bug-killing bacteria throughout the entire growing season—they are a bio-manipulation strategy that marches in the opposite of the biodiversity trends and genetic weed tolerance that organic farmers seek in their system and crop choices. While they increased convenience for farmers, the heavy reliance on the linked herbicides is causing spray-resistant weeds to emerge, requiring more types of spray or the addition of mechanical weed control—defeating a primary alleged benefit.

“There is no evidence that currently available genetically engineered crops strengthen drought tolerance or reduce fertilizer use. Nor do they fundamentally increase yields,” the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded in an overview published earlier this year.

Deteriorating soils are a contributing factor to the drop in world food reserves, according to a report issued by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology (IAASTD) in May 2008. Failure to use soil-conserving practices, decreased rainfall, destruction of cover vegetation and lack of adding soil organic matter has led to more than 20 percent of the world’s cropland being considered as degraded, cutting food production by one-sixth, the World Resources Institute reports.

Harvesting peanut hay for livestock consumption is profitable, but removes valuable carbon from this central Senegal field. Rotating with a year of millet or sorghum—and amending the soil with manure or compost ahead of the crop—helps to restore valuable soil organic matter.

Once the negative outcomes of soil loss are linked non-sustainable production systems, soil-conserving and soil-building farming will become relatively more profitable because it can compete fairly on its human, agricultural and ecological benefits.

Better soil quality managed through adding organic matter is the basis for fighting global hunger, the U.N.-sponsored IAASTD report concluded. The multiple organizations that supported the findings of some 400 researchers looked at the evidence and found that the most sustainable farming was also the most viable way to meeting the world’s basic food needs.

“Yield data just by itself makes the case for a focused and persistent move to regenerative organic farming systems,” said Dr. Tim LaSalle, CEO of the Rodale Institute, in The Organic Green Revolution. “When we also consider that organic systems are building the health of the soil, sequestering CO₂, cleaning up the waterways and returning more economic yield to the farmer, the argument for an organic green revolution becomes overwhelming.”

Greg Bowman is communications manager for the Rodale Institute.

1. The Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/y6831e/y6831e00.HTM

2. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted in November that crude values would soon rebound to above $100 a barrel and double again by 2030 due to oil fields declining faster than expected. The report says: "While market imbalances could temporarily cause prices to fall back, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the era of cheap oil is over." (The Guardian (November 7, 2008, p.37)