In some cases, such as with fossil fuels, this is self-evident, and the solutions, though taking some effort, are obvious. We need to take advantage of natural processes which will last as long as the planet does -- put solar panels on every home in the country, for example, and set up wind turbines, geothermal heating and cooling systems, and so on, instead of relying on oil and coal, the supplies of which are finite.
However, there are some other non-renewable resources we don’t usually think about as being non-renewable, and the solution to their overuse is not so obvious. The best example is groundwater.
As industrial agricultural production becomes more intense due to population concerns, there is little reason to believe this rate of depletion will do anything but increase. The models are not clear on how much longer the Ogallala will be able to provide water, but obviously you cannot take out more than is put in indefinitely – at some point, it will be empty. When it is empty, the environment in which it sits dry and idle has a name: “desert”. That is a dry and dusty sounding moniker to hang on the breadbasket of the country.
This raises a serious question: what do you use instead of water to water your crops? What renewable alternative is there?
The solution to these and other tricky problems lay in rephrasing the question.
Rather than assuming we have to find ways to support the industrial agricultural model in a scenario in which resources are limited and collateral damage is unavoidable, a dramatic change in paradigm will make the whole class of worries disappear. Rather than attempting large scale watering of industrial monoculture – ie, miles and miles of corn fields, wheat fields, etc. – we ought to decentralize, and instead focus on renewable and reusable water supplies for polycultural small plots.
One of the chief criticisms of the permaculture movement and its related sustainable agriculture movements is that systems of no-till polyculture make industrial agricultural methods impossible and obviate mechanization. We argue that this is not a weakness, but is, instead, one of the principle advantages of permaculture. The chief disadvantage lay not in the inability of permaculture to generate yields sufficient to feed the world, but rather in the lack of will to provide consumers worldwide with the resources necessary to feed themselves. Instead of using a tractor and a combine in Nebraska to feed a peasant in Thailand, why not use a shovel and a hoe in Thailand to help that peasant grow his own food?
The “Green Revolution” of the last half-century has, in fact, produced massive gains in crop yields, but far from eliminating starvation, as is often claimed as the brass ring to be grabbed by agritechnology, these incredible – one might even say ridiculous – increases in productivity as measured by quantity have been matched by stunning and monumental declines in quality, such that people whose primary problem used to be getting enough calories are now faced with an overabundance of empty calories. By some estimates, the typical decline in nutritional value of produce over the last 50 years is on the order of 25-50 percent.
We are draining our water supplies in order to produce food no one should be forced to eat, and we are supporting a global economy in which people who should be given start-up loans to go to work are instead forced to sit idly accepting handouts of food whose quality could be surpassed by a hunter-gatherer’s diet.
Industrial agriculture is an evolutionary dead-end.
Small scale, local, organic production, on the other hand, produces crops generally acknowledged to be more flavorful, healthier, and easier on the environment. And – more to the point – there is nowhere in the world where this type of production cannot be implemented. There is no need for industrial agriculture; subsidized exports of wheat and other foodstuffs are an albatross around our necks, doing no good for the rest of the world, lining the pockets of a few corporate big wigs, and depleting our natural resources in the process.
Critics might argue that watering a hundred small farms would deplete just as much water as the process of watering one very large farm, but that is because the critics know nothing about the methods of permaculture, nor about the innovations inherent in small-scale sustainable production. No-till practices by their very nature require heavy use of mulches which are almost always a form of “compost in place”, and which increase the moisture-retention abilities of topsoil by orders of magnitude.
Further, small-scale productions are much better adapted to water conservation methods like rainwater collection or greywater reclamation, and they have greater incentive to invest in these alternative procedures, given their relative size.
Then, too, small farms are more likely to practice polyculture, rather than monocropping. As the coffee farmers of Central and South America have rediscovered in the last decade or so, “shade-grown” coffee, which is part of a multi-species ecosystem, rather than a single-crop field, requires far less water. Yes, polyculture eliminates the ability to use mechanical harvesting methods, making it more labor intensive and therefore more expensive at market, but the reduction in water costs, fertilizer costs, pesticide and herbicide costs, transportation and fossil fuel costs, and improved quality and nutritional value and the associated reduction in future health care costs more than offset the labor costs.
Ultimately, the accretion of risks involved in taking essentially natural processes and attempting to manufacture “improvements” is simply too great to bear. The misuse of water resources by industrial agriculture is only one of its many malfeasances.
The assurances given to ranchers, and passed along to the general public, that bone meal was perfectly fine for cattle, were based on the best available scientific data, which was actually fairly considerable. These were not careless scientists and bureaucrats who made the horribly tragic mistake of feeding animal products to herbivores – this was a well thought out plan, backed up by considerable data.
It was also completely wrong.
This particular tragedy probably could not have been predicted; however, the fact of some sort of tragic consequences definitely could have been predicted. A diet for a whole class of animals which evolved for very specific reasons cannot and could not be engineered, no matter how clever the researchers, to be so thoroughly and completely different from the diet naturally preferred by those animals without there being a swath of unforeseen consequences.
Feed lot biochemistry is just one area where we have been thumbing our noses at Mother Nature. As Masanobu Fukuoka put it, “When we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the front door with a pitchfork.” For many thousands of years now we have been planting fields with just one crop, depleting the nutrients in the soil and then moving on to new fields. We have been taking water out of natural reservoirs, drying them up, and then moving on. We have been burning down, bulldozing, turning under, planting something alien for a few years, and then moving on.
Maybe we shouldn’t keep moving on. The original farmers were just tribes who found a place where what they wanted to eat seemed to be growing fairly well, and they stayed and protected those naturally occurring stands of wheat and figs, until they learned all they could about tending them and caring for them and propagating them.
We joke that we never want to move again – we want to be buried in the yard. We haven't done the research, but if the product of the cremation process is at all compatible with the making of biochar, why the heck not? We'll reside at Myrtle's forever.
Happy farming!
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