Sustainable Agriculture Part 9

THE EARTHSCAN READER IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

EDITED BY JULES PRETTY

EARTHSCAN          2005

PART IX

 

PART V: PERSPECTIVES FROM DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Perspective 22: Rethinking Agriculture for New Opportunities by Erick Fernandes, Alice Pell & Norman Uphoff

Over the last 30 years, the creation and exploitation of new genetic potentials of cereal crops, leading to what is called the Green Revolution, has saved hundreds of millions of people around the world from extreme hunger and malnutrition, and tens of millions from starvation. However, these technologies for improving crop yields have not been maintaining their momentum. The rate of yield increase for cereals worldwide – around 2.4% in the 1970s and 2% in the 1980s – was only about 1% in the 1990s. Although the global food production system has performed well in recent decades, will further support of conventional agricultural research and extension programmes increase yields sufficiently to meet anticipated demand?

• The next doubling of food production will have to be accomplished with less land per capita and with less water than is now available. Both genetic improvements and changes in management will be required.
• Many of the advances in food production could be achieved by developing agricultural systems that capitalize more systematically on biological and agroecological dynamics rather than relying so much on agrochemicals, mechanical and petrochemical energy and genetic modification. This will require, however, some rethinking of what constitutes agriculture.
• ‘Low-tech’ methods can be very productive with now-better-understood scientific bases. Farming systems such as those for rice in Madagascar, maize and beans in Central America and potatoes and barley in the Andes demonstrates that output can be raised substantially, sometimes several-fold, with limited dependence on external resources. These crops are staples that are essential for meeting world food needs.
• Valid ecological and social considerations now make it imperative that further advances be environmentally friendly as well as economically sustainable and socially equitable.
• More than increased food supply is needed: we should aim to ensure balanced and adequate supplies of nutrients that people can afford. Adverse environmental and health externalities that result from modern agricultural methods – soil erosion, chemical hazards, soil and water pollution – are things that nobody would like to see increased, let alone doubled, as we seek to double the production of food.

 

Agriculture as field-culture: An etymological perspective

• The very concept of agriculture as it has been understood and practised in the West has been shaped by its semantic origins, coming from the Latin word ager, ‘field’.
• A bias in favour of fields means that horticulture gets somewhat marginalized in most institutions dealing with agriculture, including universities.
• Gardens and orchards, being small, have lower status than fields, even if they produce several times more value per unit of land when intensively managed.
• Farming systems of most rural households around the world depend crucially upon livestock and poultry, large and/or small, together with home gardens and orchards and often with fish ponds and hedgerows.
• In many areas of Asia, acceptance of the short-stalked, high-yielding cereal varieties that made the Green Revolution was low, because the quantity and quality of the fodder produced by the new varieties was insufficient to meet livestock requirements.
• Farmers were willing to accept lower yields of grain in order to be able to feed their animals, which provided them with the manure they needed to maintain soil fertility and the traction required for tilling their land.

An argument sometimes made against livestock production is that animals are inherently wasteful; more calories can be produced per hectare from plants than from animals. If animals are fed on forages and byproducts, however, rather than competing with humans for edible grain, such ‘wastefulness’ can be beneficial. In extensive and semi-extensive systems, animals that range freely during the day harvest plant nutrients from non-arable areas; at night when they are penned, most of these nutrients are deposited in their enclosure, later to be distributed onto cropland. In parts of West Africa, pastoralists often negotiate grazing contracts with crop-growing neighbours. Pastoralists are encouraged to graze their cattle on fields with crop residues because the cattle deposit manure: their owners may even receive additional compensation for this service. If animals were in fact highly efficient in their conversion of harvested nutrients, there would be less transfer of nutrients from rangelands to croplands.

• When green and animal manures are judiciously used in combination, nutrient availability can be nicely synchronized to meet plant demands. Thus, animal production can be beneficial in ecological as well as human nutritional terms.
• An additional consideration obscured by a preoccupation with fields is that common property resources for grazing and for forest products are an essential part of many households’ economic operations.

Developing an adequate knowledge base for more productive and sustainable agriculture should start with explicit acknowledgment that agriculture involves much more than fields and field crops. Staple foods are essential for food security. The world in general needs more, rather than less, of them, especially for the 800 million people who are currently undernourished. Other sources of calories are also important – potatoes, cassava, yams, sorghum, millet, sweet potatoes, taro, fish, meat, milk and so on – and these have been given much less support than rice, wheat and maize. Calories, while necessary for survival, are not sufficient for human health. To achieve balanced diets, including essential micronutrients, the whole complex of flora and fauna that rural households manage to achieve food security and maintain their living standards should be better understood and utilized.

• Not only should fixation on individual crops be avoided, but a broader understanding of the biophysical unit for agriculture is needed.
• A narrow focus on fields is giving way to a broader focus on landscapes and/or watersheds, within which fields function as interdependent units, especially as we gain a better agroecological understanding of agriculture.

 

Assumptions associated with field-centered agriculture

Several limitations arise from this longstanding concept of agriculture. In different ways, each works against strategies for intensified and sustainable agricultural development that use the full set of local resources most productively.

The time dimension of agriculture: A cyclical view

In lore and literature, agriculture is described and celebrated as ‘the cycle of the seasons’. How is agriculture practised with its field-based definition? By ploughing, planting, weeding, protecting and finally harvesting. Farmers then wait until the next growing season to plough, plant, weed, protect and harvest again, and wait once more for the next planting time. Planting defines agriculture in our minds as does the activity of harvesting. Yet if one looks beyond this standardized seasonal conception of agriculture, one finds trees that keep their leaves year-round, sheep that lamb twice a year, and microbes that continuously decompose soil organic matter with generation intervals measured in hours or minutes. These different time frames all affect agricultural performance.

• Fixation on an annual cycle of agriculture has arisen from its practice in temperate climates, where most modern scientific advances have been made. There, summer and winter seasons are the central fact of agricultural life.
• The year-round agriculture of tropical zones seems somehow irregular, almost unnatural, since it lacks periodic cultivation.
• There was no annual cycle of ploughing, planting and so on, which counterparts in colder climates had to maintain.
• People who harvested what they had not planted, or had not planted recently, were not regarded as ‘real agriculturists’ by people from temperate zones.
• With agriculture seen primarily as a matter of cultivation, annual crops get more attention and status than perennials.
• The latter have very important roles to play, however, particularly if one is concerned with the sustainability of agriculture.
• Their growth usually does not disturb or tax the soil as much, or as often, as does annual cropping. The latter invests in myriad biological ‘factories’ that produce food or fibre and then demolishes them at the end of the season. On the other hand, trees, vines or crops that rattoon keep all or most of that biological factory intact from year to year.

Farmers have long known that combining a variety of perennials with annuals, animals and horticultural crops creates opportunities for more total output from given areas of land during the year, and with less pressure on soil resources; energy and nutrient flows are more efficient, and adverse pest and environmental impacts can be reduced by growing perennials rather than annuals. Especially if the sustainability of agricultural production is an objective, giving perennials a larger role in agriculture makes sense.

Within agriculture understood in annualist terms, fallows are periods of rest and recuperation for the soil, a kind of gap in the cropping calendar. Many farmers, however, have thought of fallows differently, managing them so that they are more productive than land that is simply left alone. ‘Managed fallows’ are not an oxymoron but rather a source of supplementary income, providing fodder, fruit or other benefits while enriching the soil when leguminous species or plants otherwise considered to be weeds are allowed or encouraged to grow. Cropping cycles are best looked at in terms of how soil fertility can be continuously enhanced while utilizing a wide variety of plant and animal species – a strategy described as ‘permaculture’ by Mollison (1990) – looking beyond crops that are planted periodically.

Spatial dimensions of agriculture: Thinking in terms of soil volume instead of surface

Agriculture has been defined and limited by a mental construction of agricultural space in much the same way that it has been stereotyped in terms of annual cycles.

• Agriculture can be made more productive by conceiving and treating soil in three-dimensional terms, as volume, doing more than just breaking its surface and working it two-dimensionally.
• In many traditional farming systems around the world, one finds soil being mounded into raised beds and even raised fields; terraces are constructed to retain and improve the soil and to make watering it easier, and drains are often installed.
• Soil-working activities are intended not just to exploit the soil’s fertility but to improve it.
• In some farming systems one finds no ploughing, just the planting of seeds in undisturbed soil.

In the coming decades, efforts to raise yields per hectare should not take the quality and durability of soil for granted, as the health and fertility of the soil are critical for productive and sustainable agriculture. Soil should be understood and managed in terms of its volume rather than its surface. Raising output sustainably will require more than working chemical fertilizers into the top horizon. Thinking of soil three-dimensionally should be part of any strategy for sustainable agricultural intensification.

Monoculture as ‘real’ agriculture