Crises have come about on our planet because we are following an economic model. We must design a new agriculture for a changing planet   

Miguel Altieri

    I barely squeaked over White Pass this weekend in the middle of one of the biggest early snowstorms in recent memory. So Ive had the definitive taste of winter driving: pump the brakes, slow and steady, no sudden turns.

    But hazarding the pass was worth it to be part of this years Tilth Producers Conference in Yakima. Farmer Arwen Norman was there; Sandy Bradley was present. Larry Warnberg stayed home to tend the farm, though he sent a beautiful cherry wood cutting board for the silent auction. It joined an amazing array of items including a 60-pound bag of clover (a nitrogen fixing cover crop), forging equipment, and 1,000 pounds of ZooDoo (manure from the Seattle Zoo great fertilizer!).

   

Back to the future

    My favorite workshop was Horse Power at Welcome Table Ranch given by Walla Walla ranch owners Emily and Andy Asmus.

    Its back to the future for this family. They showed home movies of their 4-year-old gelding draft horse, Dandy, and mare, Avi. They also brought hand-made implements, some over a hundred years old, for harrowing, plowing and potato digging.

    Emily is the teamster (in the original meaning of driving a team of draft animals) and watching her turn this team during plowing was inspiring. Dandys job is to tread in the trough, swinging around to find the furrow so the rows line up.

    Ive never been a horse person, but I respect and appreciate the equine heritage, remnants of which are found in our use of horsepower. The Asmus shared a spreadsheet comparing draft-power with tractor power. (Horses came out on top.) And there were the inevitable questions about horses versus mules. Horses live to serve but mules live to get even, one participant said. Many chuckled knowingly.

   

Agroecology

    The highlight of the conference was the keynote delivered by professor Miguel Altieri of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, at the University of California. His specialty agroecology combines agriculture, the science of cultivating the land and raising livestock with the principles of ecology, the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environments.

    Altieri began with a series of startling statistics proving that small-scale indigenous agriculture is actually more productive than industrialized agribusiness when measured in total output.

    There is a huge myth that big industrial farms produce more food than small farmers. No! he said. (Data is available at foodfirst.org.) Last week I quoted Wendell Berry who put his finger on it, Agri-business has given us massive soil erosion and degradation, water pollution, maritime hypoxic zones; destroyed rural communities and cultures; reduced our farming population almost to disappearance; and yielded toxic food

    In the business world, these are called externalized costs or externalities that is, costs which must be borne by society as a whole, which are neither reflected in the cost of the product nor paid for by the company making the profit. One undeniable example: industrialized soy and corn production is not only subsidized by U.S. taxpayers but has given us unprecedented rates of obesity and childhood diabetes.

   

Systems at risk

    As Altieri said, Our natural systems are collapsing. We are seeing deforestation and topsoil erosion on our land; fresh water scarcity; and our fisheries are in danger. Associated with these ecological issues are socio-economic problems. Food availability is the link between the social and the ecological. As fertilizer and petroleum prices go up, world food costs have followed, he added, showing another data stream.

    Major corporations now control both the seeds for food production (primarily Monsanto, Sygenta and Dupont) and fertilizer (Cargill, ADM, and Bunge). Basically we have an agriculture without farmers. They are prisoners, Altieri said.

    In past eras, farmers saved their own seed from crops adapted year after year to their particular climate. Now commercial seed are hybrids, which do not reproduce. Further, most hybrids are patented. (For the full story, check out the Organic Seed Alliance site www.seedalliance.org.)

    Add to that the biofuels movement (biomass being used for fuel production in lieu of petrochemicals) and we humans have a perfect storm: the agro-industrial convergence that leaves one billion people on our planet hungry. Altieri noted that If all the corn production in the U.S. was used for ethanol it would satisfy only 12 percent of our energy needs so why are we even going down that path?

    Another quiet crime against humanity is happening right in front of our eyes in what Altieri calls a land grab in South America and Africa. The big boys, mentioned above, can see the writing on the wall: the end of this century is going to be about food (and water) scarcity. So corporations want to secure their control over the most basic human needs by adding land for food production to their seed and fertilizer monopolies. The future of the seven billion (and counting) people on planet earth is not a pretty picture.

Los Campesinos

    As a counter to these disastrous trends, Professor Altieri has made it his job to study with indigenous peoples. Though Camepsino has no real equivalent in English, Altieri uses the term peasants to talk about the indigenous farmers who are doing it right. In the Andes, they have been farming for 5,000 years with the same systems I call that sustainable! he said.

    The Andean terraces have well understood micro-climates charted and named (Kichwa fuerte, Kichwa, Jalka, and Templado) just as Native Hawaiians understood that families needed pie-shaped wedges, from the top of the island to the sea, in order to tend and have access to papaya, avocado, taro and fish.

    Western-style industrialized agriculture is replacing these traditional systems around the world. In Asia, in the Phillipines and China, where people were growing rice, fish, eels, ducks and trees with very intricate interactions these systems have been converted to monoculture.

    Altieri has studied these peasant practices passed down for generations and shown that the interactions have a scientific basis resulting in greater output and increased resilience. He and fellow scientists have also shown that in many indigenous cultures weeds have medicinal and nutritional value. Biodiversity is not just a buzzword; it is a critical component of peasant agriculture.

    Fifty percent of the worlds food today is coming from small farmers. There are 1.5 million farmers working on 380 million small farms and we need to follow their lead. We need to decouple our agriculture from its dependence on fossil fuels and create, or recreate, multi-functional local food systems with high biodiversity.

    Now thats what Im talking about.