Questions to ask if you're reading about alternative agricultural systems

[sebenikela]

(x-post of my very long answer to a question someone asked me a month and a half ago)

fractalpaladin asked: do you have any recommendations for people trying to learn more about how societies organize around agriculture? tumblr seems to think Permaculture is the Solution to Everything, and yeah it's nice-sounding, but if i want to have a decent handle on the actual scale of problems vs solutions, where would a good starting place be?

Mostly this is a list of things to think about when someone starts talking about their Best Kind Of Agriculture, and then I have a couple book recs.

1. Does it obey basic physics like the conservation of matter?

This sounds like it’d be something you could assume but actually it’s not. What I mean is, when you’re growing plants to harvest, you take things like nitrogen and phosphorous away with you, so you’ve got to put SOMETHING back into the soil, or else you’re just relying on whatever stores of nutrients the soil had in it to start with, and those will run out eventually.

Fertilizer is the easiest way to put nutrients back into the soil. In sensible doses it has a pretty low environmental impact, but when you use a lot of it you can cause problems.

Manure is the other obvious thing to add. If you’re trying to look at a full life-cycle thing the nutrients in that manure came from somewhere else, and that gets complicated (but fundamentally so does everything to do with agriculture). It’s also possible to cause environmental damage if you add too much manure, or add manure at times when plants can’t use it so it just drains away. You also need a lot of manure and it’s bulky to transport.

Legumes are magic, in this case, because in partnership with rhizobium they turn nitrogen from the air into nitrogen plants can use. And since the atmosphere is like 70% N you’re not going to run out any time soon.

If you’re not including some combination of these three, and if it’s manure or legumes if you’re not including A FUCK LOAD of them, then it’s likely not something that’ll work long term. If you’re relying on manure trucked in from someplace it’s probably not something that can be scaled up easily.

This, incidentally, is why mixed crop-livestock systems work well. There’s a Permaculture version of this I think? but in general you can think about having a big pasture area (1 ha per dairy cow is the rule of thumb I remember, but it’ll depend on how much rain and how much winter you have). The animals stay and poop somewhere accessible at night, and you collect that to fertilize your grain/fruit/veggie crops. If you’ve got enough pasture, the manure the animals deposit while they graze plus the stuff fixed by legumes in your pasture can sustain that as a feed source. It’s hard to get enough pastured livestock to make this work at a large scale though.

2. Is it sold as the One True Way to do agriculture?

If so, back away slowly. Permaculture purists do this, Conservation Agriculture purists do this, Organic purists do it, Agroecology purists do it… it’s a bad look.

People have farms in all kinds of different environments. Farming will look different in each of those places.

“But the PRINCIPLES transfer everywhere, see?”

Do they really? Take the permaculture/agroecology/organic ag examples. If you are transitioning your farm from conventional to low- (or no-) input ecological systems, there is a period where your yields will go down. Even if you can get back up to the levels of production you had before, it takes time for all the biological processes to do their thing and set up a self-sustaining feedback loop. If you’re growing maize and you want to switch to using compost and mulching, but your maize is short and spindly and there’s not much of it, that means not much to compost or use as mulch. Which means you’re not putting enough into the soil, which leads back to point #1, and your yields go down.

Also, farmers innovate. Everywhere. This is why they’re so pissed about John Deere et al and Right to Repair. If your plan doesn’t let people adjust to what works for them, it’s a bad plan.

Dogma belongs in theology, not in agronomy.

3. Can someone farming this way make a decent living?

Now, this is somewhat unfair, because it’s really really hard for farmers to make a decent living, everywhere from Iowa to Mali to Ecuador to India to Australia. But it’s an important consideration.

4. How much labor does this require and how shitty is that labor?

Again, a lot of current ag doesn’t do great at this, but think about what the labor implications are for whatever you’re proposing. Also think about who’s going to end up DOING the labor–men? women? kids? poorly-paid and exploited farmworkers? Would YOU be okay doing that job for, say, a year?

5. Does this kind of farming use biological and ecological processes to make it work better?

We know a lot about how soil and plants work, we know a lot about insects and predation in insect populations, we know a lot about plant pathogens and how to avoid them, and about ways we can use the natural environment to make our jobs easier. If you’re ignoring those (see: a lot of large-scale monocultures) your system kind of sucks

6. Does it follow the scientific method?

Sometimes you get people recommending things based on informal or anecdotal information. Some things about plant associations are like this. Let me be totally clear here: local informal knowledge absolutely counts as a source of useful information. However, if someone is proposing a whole system they think should be used widely, they should give some evidence that they tested that system first. Doesn’t have to be academically-published p<0.05 randomized block trials, but it DOES have to test the new thing against the old things and tell you about what happened. Some things people have been doing for centuries are great (controlled burns in grasslands and forests!) and some things are not (some kinds of irrigation), and some are probably neutral but can’t be proven (planting based on the phase of the moon). The good old “hypothesis, experiment, results, conclusion” scientific method is the best way we have for trying to determine which things people do “because it’s always been done this way” are beneficial.

7. Does it ...sigh... feed the world?

Most of the time this is a red herring bullshit argument. BUT. Some things we just need, like a shit-ton of basic grains like maize, wheat and rice. If there isn’t a place in your Extremely Ecological (or super high-tech vertical farming) system for pretty significant areas of grain crops, that’s a red flag.

8. How much change does it demand from OUTSIDE agriculture?

Agroecology a la Miguel Altieri* posits a fundamental restructuring of food systems and basically the destruction of capitalism. Which is cool! I am not a fan of capitalism in its current incarnation! But that’s a really big project so meanwhile how are farmers NOW going to survive. (Altieri came and spoke at Wageningen University when I was there and it was very frustrating, he wanted to talk about his Perfect System and when asked about things like “how do farmers on shitty soil survive in the short term?” he got weasely.) Less radical examples include making the world vegetarian or upending commodity trading. These are not necessarily bad things, but if you’re wondering why someone’s lovely sounding way to fix agriculture isn’t already implemented, this is a good place to start looking for answers.

*note that “agroecology” is also used to describe farming practices that lean heavily on using ecological processes, or just for “sustainable” farming sometimes, so you gotta check who’s using the word and how.

—

Okay, recommendations for things to read… this is tough because most of the pop sci ag stuff breaks rule 2 all over the place.

I just looked through my bookshelves and found a grand total of 2 books I can recommend, both with slight caveats:

Consulting the Genius of the Place, by Wes Jackson

Dr. Jackson (he has a PhD in plant genetics) founded the Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, USA. They’ve been trying to breed perennial grain crops (particularly wheat) for decades, with the premise that agriculture should use perennials instead of annual crops you have to plant every year. This is very long-term thinking.

The book is a lot broader than that, but Jackson focuses hard on soil and soil health as the One Most Important Thing. Which …he’s not WRONG, but he’s more extreme about it than I am.

Farmer First: Farmer innovation and agricultural research; Robert Chambers, Arnold Pacey and Lori Ann Thrupp, eds.

This is both quite old and not about agricultural systems per se. It is however a classic in the area of participatory action research. So it’s got some good information about how to CREATE agricultural systems that don’t suck. Robert Chambers is one of the first guys to really systematize participatory research, so his stuff in general is good on that.

If people are interested I could probably pull together some “start here” journal article PDFs and put them on google drive. It’d take some time though so maybe reply here if that’s something you’d actually use.

...and after all that I’m still not sure I actually answered the question. For more “how societies organize around agriculture” you’d want history and/or anthropology literature which I’m less familiar with. Someone should write a good pop sci book about this and I call not it

Comments

[elusiveat]

Thank you for sharing this!

If so, back away slowly. Permaculture purists do this, Conservation Agriculture purists do this, Organic purists do it, Agroecology purists do it… it’s a bad look.

Kind of reminds me of the time my soil science professor Michael Singer started off a class session with some comments that included a passing remark that organic agriculture could never be sustainable. What a statement!

3. Can someone farming this way make a decent living?

Now, this is somewhat unfair, because it’s really really hard for farmers to make a decent living, everywhere from Iowa to Mali to Ecuador to India to Australia. But it’s an important consideration.

I've been stuck on this one for the past six months or so. Do you know of any societies at all where the people doing the actual work to produce staple foods make what might be called a middle income for that society? Like, at all?

It's... worrying.

a grand total of 2 books I can recommend

Thanks for these. I hope I get it together to actually look at them. I've debating whether Wes Jackson should be on my reading list or not. The perennials argument resonates for me but the premise of the Land Institute kind of bothers me. Like, the argument seems to be that we need to keep the system we have but make the plants perennial, rather than changing what kinds of crops we focus on. I seem to recall from some course on crop evolution or similar that it's not an accident that so many of our crops are annuals and that in fact humans have often selected in favor of annual habit in order to increase yields. Re-examining which crops we use and why seemed like a better starting point.

[sebenikela]

The perennials argument resonates for me but the premise of the Land Institute kind of bothers me. Like, the argument seems to be that we need to keep the system we have but make the plants perennial, rather than changing what kinds of crops we focus on.

I've met a couple people who work at the Land Institute, and I think their view is a bit more nuanced than this. Their theoretical ideal is essentially creating a crop field that works like a prairie, and perennials are a key part of that (so you don't need to plow or plant yearly). They've actually done some work creating a grain-producing intermediate wheatgrass they call kernza, which could be a dual grain/forage crop if they can build a market for it. I did some work during my MSc looking at nitrate leaching in those kernza systems, and because of the hardier and longer-lived root system the leaching is reduced by a LOT when compared to (annual) wheat.

Oh, and the reason annuals were easier to domesticate: to some extent there's a trade-off between making lots of big (tasty) seeds, and making big hardy root systems that can keep a plant alive through the winter/dry season. Plus you can breed annuals on a 1-year selection cycle (or less with greenhouses and rapid phenotyping and stuff) but if "perenniality" is one of your criteria you have to wait at least a year and a half between generations. This is why even after 20+ years of trying to make a perennial wheat, the LI hasn't had much success. That's a big part of why they started essentially trying to domesticate a perennial wheat relative (intermediate wheatgrass) which has been afaik more successful (as of 2012, idk what's happened since then)

Anyway, they do suffer somewhat from the more dogmatic view of how agriculture "should be" but the people I've worked with tend to be more realistic about near-term goals. (It helps that they're based in Salina, KS, so they're at least kind of in touch with actual farmers) Wes Jackson in particular is this weird mix of crop breeder, ecologist, farmer, and philosopher-type that makes for an interesting viewpoint even if i definitely don't agree with everything he has to say.

It's... worrying

It really is!

I did some looking around when I was finalizing my thesis and basically: no. You can make a decent living with huge areas of land, sometimes (US/Canada); and you can make a decent living if agriculture is heavily subsidized (EU, and less so US/Can). If your society is not very complex and everyone is poor, then farmers aren't poorer than anyone else, but it really seems like as soon as you have something that can be called a "middle class" farmers are mostly excluded from it. Most examples I've seen of "successful" farmers are either relying on a non-farming income source or choose to live off-grid in yurts or what have you (not that there's anything wrong with living off-grid in yurts, but it's not real scalable). Soooometimes if farmer cooperatives are well-organized and can negotiate higher prices, but that's really hard with staples because there's no leverage.

it's a real problem, and I don't know enough about economics to say why it is this way or how to fix it. I should look harder at the ag econ literature and see if someone's working on this, but I haven't come across anything.

[elusiveat]

I don't think that what you're saying about LI contradicts what I'm saying. Basically, I was *not at all* surprised when I heard that Kernza wasn't ("yet") producing the yields they had been hoping for. Like, it's more of a hobby/niche crop than a realistic way of producing wheat at scale.

There seems to be an assumption at LI that with a bit more breeding they'll get where they want to be, but the perenniality of the crop seems to me to be a problem in itself. And I think they ought to expect this.

Most examples I've seen of "successful" farmers are either relying on a non-farming income source or choose to live off-grid in yurts or what have you (not that there's anything wrong with living off-grid in yurts, but it's not real scalable).

I'm not sure I'm following. What do you mean by "scalable"? If 100 people can do it, why can't 1,000,000 people do it?

And are you saying that people living off-grid *can* achieve middle income? Or just a decent quality of life?

It's a real problem, and I don't know enough about economics to say why it is this way or how to fix it.

I suspect it has something to do with the farm economics paradox that as farmer incomes go up, the number of people farming goes down. I think this is supposed to be because when farmers have disposable income they start spending it on stuff other than production, which creates non-agricultural jobs.

My intuition is that once you have those non-agricultural jobs, there starts being accumulation of non-agricultural wealth, with all of the accompanying horrible skewing toward Pareto wealth distributions.

When I try to tangle with this issue I keep coming to the question of what we really need is a social contract where all able-bodied people are expected to spend a portion of their time (either a portion of their work week or a portion of their life span) working in food production. That's very different from what most cultures do now, and I'm not sure that it's remotely realistic.

Somebody suggested I read up on the Mennonites. That might be interesting.

[elusiveat]

Oh, and the other issue I have with LI, which I didn't quite lay out, is that I don't really understand their obsession with grains. Anecdotally, tubers are the way to go if you want to produce lots of calories per acre. Nut trees also seem like a good pathway toward perennial production.

[sebenikela]

Somebody suggested I read up on the Mennonites.
I grew up Mennonite, but not the kind that dresses different. Probably what'd actually interest you are Hutterites (they're religious cousins), they live really communally, mostly in the northern great plains area, and are managing to do pretty well by their own standards. So do many Amish communities (another cousin), but there's recently been quite a few stories about sexual abuse and incest in Amish communities in PA that goes on for years because Amish people don't believe in talking to police and they believe victims should forgive their rapists (as do quite a few Mennonites), so I'd be careful about idealizing them too much.

And are you saying that people living off-grid *can* achieve middle income? Or just a decent quality of life?
I think people can define their idea of "a decent quality of life" such that a homesteading/off-grid life meets their standards. I don't think that most people in the US would consider those standards acceptable. That's sort of what I mean about "not scalable."

re: LI

They've been having the "is perennial wheat even possible" debates in specialized plant breeding and crop science journals/areas, but I don't have the plant physiology experience to really judge. In any case, they are actual scientists with PhDs in relevant fields and good publication records, so it's not like it's just a bunch of guys messing around.

I think their focus on grains has more to do with the ecosystem where they're located than anything else. Kansas is historically tallgrass prairie, which is incredibly productive in terms of biomass, and so they're trying to mimic that. Some LI people were part of a group that came to Mali to look at agroforestry practiced by local people using shea trees, and they've been working with my old advisor on pigeonpea, which is semi-perennial, in Malawi. They just have very limited resources and funding so they're focusing on what's local to them.

I don't know that what they want is possible but I think it's worth having people work on. There's people trying to make rice a C4 crop and make grains fix nitrogen like legumes (well, rhizobia do the fixing but you know what I mean).

Re: tubers being better at calories/acre... maybe? I think that falls into the "one True Way" trap a bit. Sure, potatoes or cassava get you a ton of calories, but farming potatoes creates a ton of soil disturbance and potential for erosion, as does pretty much any root crop. Cassava is a great source of calories but it's pretty much pure starch, even more so than rice or maize. There's probably an argument to be made for eating more potatoes and less wheat, but I doubt many peope are willing to give up bread/tortillas/etc.

ANYWAY

I should go do some actual work, but this is an interesting conversation :)

[elusiveat]

Don't have time for a full reply but I just couldn't resist this bait...

In any case, they are actual scientists with PhDs in relevant fields and good publication records, so it's not like it's just a bunch of guys messing around.

[ahem] So are the conventional-agronomy-Green-Revolution people ; )

[elusiveat]

P.S. I know the LI people from academic conferences, so I know exactly who they are and have had dinner with some of them, years and years ago.

I'm not sure if Jerry Glover is one of the people you mentioned going into Mali, but I saw him give a very impressive talk that he gave about USAID work on creative agricultural systems in Africa, including agroforestry. Don't remember what kind of tree it was they were using, though.