Sustainable Agriculture

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Thanks to a complex international system of production, processing, shipping, and marketing, people today can eat a vast selection of out-of-season and out-of-region fruits and vegetables year round. In addition, modern farming practices have provided an abundant, not just a varied, food supply. However, the availability of abundant and varied food relies on energy-intensive,nonrenewable resources such as fossil fuels, and many practices associated with agribusiness have had a detrimental impact on the environment.

Agribusiness looks at farms as factories to be run as profitably and efficiently as possible. "How much, how fast" replaces the old values of carrying capacity (how much the land can yield without being depleted) and a season of lying fallow. Monocropping (fields used for only one crop, the same crop year after year, commonly wheat, soybeans or cotton) and increased field size do away with biodiversity and hedgerows, and thus with fertility, pollinators, and resistance to insects and disease.

Millions of tons of chemical fertilizers applied to fields destroy microorganisms that are vital to the health of the soil. The intensive use of herbicides and pesticides kills pollinating insects that are essential for crop production. Manure and crop residues, once valuable sources of soil nutrition, are no longer tilled in and have become polluting waste products themselves, to be burned or dumped. Underground aquifers (natural water reservoirs) that took thousands of years to fill are pumped dry to irrigate fields in semi-arid regions.

Additionally, ground water is full of dissolved mineral salts. As the water evaporates it leaves a salt concentration buildup that is poisoning the soil. Intensive plowing opens up hundreds of thousands of acres of topsoil to erosion by wind and rain, filling the air with dust or silting up waterways.

As more and more wild land is converted to growing one particular crop on a massive scale, genetic biodiversity diminishes. Rain forests are bulldozed to provide pastures for cheap beef. Massive feedlot operations are susceptible to catastrophic diseases, and they pollute drinking water supplies with their tons of confined manure.

Agribusiness also affects the economy. Family farmers are increasingly replaced by corporate managers, and the price of farm equipment and capital outlay soars. Profits from production may go to a large company based far away from the actual farm and never enter the local economy. In addition, large-scale food production and distribution have become vulnerable to the vagaries of international politics and the stock market, and any breakdown in the network places everyone at risk. The price of oil, interest rates, trucking fees, politics and the weather all affect the availability and price of food. In countries where there is economic or military chaos, even though there might be plenty of food on farms or at food aid centers, the breakdown in the complex distribution system results in famine.

Sustainable agriculture is the practice of working in concert with nature to replenish the soil in order to assure a secure, affordable food supply without depleting natural resources or disrupting the cycles of life. Proponents of sustainable agriculture suggest we can reverse the damage done by agribusiness. They believe that a dependable long-term food supply must rely on the protection of resources—seeds, food species, soil, breeding stock,and the water supply, as well as the farmer who knows and cares for a particular piece of land and the community with which the farmer is interdependent. Sustainable agriculture promotes regional and local small-scale farms that rely on the interplay of crops and livestock to replenish the soil and control erosion. The aim of a healthy farm is to produce as many kinds of plants and animals as it reasonably can. Ordered diversity is the practice of maintaining many kinds of plants and animals together to complement one another.

The practice of planting a noncommercial crop on fields to increase fertility, conserve soil moisture, keep topsoil from eroding or blowing away and encourage soil microrganisms is called cover cropping. Soil fertility, which is the major capital of any farm, can be largely maintained within the farm itself by this method and by plowing back in manure and other organic wastes. Food grown for local consumption is more fresh, can be harvested when ripe, and uses less energy to get to market. Farm stands and local farmers' markets provide more money for the farmer and higher quality, lower-price food for the consumer.

Sustainable agriculture embraces diversity of method and scale, looking for what is appropriate to a given location. One example is urban homesteading, in which thousands of vacant inner-city lots can be used to grow neighborhood gardens. Renewable energy sources, such as passive-solar greenhouses or windmills, are encouraged. Sustainable agriculture advocates organic solutions to pest control such as crop rotation, the introduction and maintenance of beneficial insects, and intercropping (growing more than one kind of crop on the same land in the same growing season). All these methods discourage insect infestations, thus reducing the amount of pesticides in the environment.

Agriculture cannot survive for long at the expense of the natural systems that support it. And a culture cannot survive at the expense of its agriculture.

Farming.

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.

Organic Farming Research Foundation. Winter 2001 Information Bulletin, no. 9. Erica Walz, ed. Santa Cruz, CA: Organic Farming Research Foundation, 2001.

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