In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

LIVING SYSTEMS

In Business, January/February, 2004, Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 32

SUSTAINABLE COMMERCE
Robert F. Young

EVOLUTION is the nature of nature. For those who wish to find permanence in things, the Earth is a very untidy place. Climates, species, ecosystems all shift and are transformed, engaging with each other to create highly chaotic but very resilient living system. Its resilience lies in its abilities to innovate, be continually productive, and adapt to the persistence of change.
Human systems too have mirrored this evolutionary path. Beginning as hunter-gatherers, eleven thousand years ago, human society began the profound transition toward a food system based upon agriculture. “Cropping up” in thousands of different forms and developing through reliance on various methods and a myriad of diverse plants and microclimates, agriculture's beginnings offered a patchwork of innovative, adaptive strategies.
The emergence and drive of the market system simplified these strategies toward one over arching goal: maximum, rapid productivity. Applying this goal to a method of production so closely tied to nature required overriding the predisposition of ecosystems. Ignoring the natural tendency of plant communities to move toward steady-state yields and the deposition of surplus into reserves, market-based agriculture became singularly focused on increasing productivity and immediate consumption.
The means of overruling nature in this fashion was to make it perform in ways that it naturally would not. Through measures such as pesticides, fossil fuel fertilizers, monocropping, mechanization, and laboratory-based genetic modification, the agriculture industry has come to appear as a rider whipping a horse harder and harder to make it run ever faster.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, in response to this industrialized agriculture, that is based as much upon violence as it is upon innovation, the organic agriculture movement was born. The guiding principles of this movement have been to suspend the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, putting in their stead organic substitutes. Although these two important goals seek to reduce some of the more distorting elements of current agribusiness, they tend more toward the maxim of “first do no harm” than illuminating a comprehensive vision towards which a new paradigm of agriculture could lead. This shortcoming is reflected in the fact that market forces have sought to channel the definition of organic farming in a variety of ways. The USDA's efforts to include sludge application and radiation as “natural” inputs are a recent example, as are the strategies of large food conglomerates to use minimal organic methods to qualify for certification. Such “corpganically” grown foods often continue to employ damaging practices such as large-scale monocropping, the use of strip-mined inputs like rock phosphate, and labor exploitation in their “production processes”.
In order to avoid such practices, a new agriculture must move beyond a perspective that mitigates only select elements of the current abusive system. It must instead provide a comprehensive vision of agriculture's next evolution. If organic methods seek to do less harm, the next step must be to develop practices that embrace natural systems.
This next evolution in agriculture is beginning to take form. Researchers at University of California in Santa Cruz have pioneered the new field of agro ecology. Wes Jackson and the Land Institute have sought to introduce to agriculture in prairie ecosystems the concept of farming in nature's image. Cornell University and New York State Cooperative Extension are currently engaged in a project to begin to define the parameters of ecological agriculture. At our own experimental farm in upstate New York, we have been working to tie farming to natural ecosystems through a practice we term living systems.
Each of these approaches seeks to identify the natural flows and relationships in ecosystems and to develop agricultural practices that take advantage of the patterns and synergies of nature. In this sense, each of these new methods is a departure of evolutionary scale from current agricultural production. Rather than override nature's practice through the use of fossil fuels, poison, and exploited resources, they seek to work with what nature has to teach and to offer.
This is a tall order. It involves recovering lost cultural knowledge, vanished now after several generations of industrial farming. It involves far deeper understanding of the complex, site specific and unique manner in which ecological systems operate. And it involves considerable research into how to bring modern science together with historical practices and our evolving comprehension of ecosystem dynamics to create a new form of agriculture.
Pieces of this new paradigm have been the subject of considerable labor over the past several decades. Elements such as integrated pest management, companion planting, green manures, vermicomposting, living mulches, native plants, agroforestry, and low-impact organic inputs are each attempts to develop methods that address particular components of our current dysfunctional agriculture. What the efforts at U.C. Santa Cruz, The Land Institute, Cornell University, and hundreds of single farms are doing is to integrate them into a resilient productive system of farming that is adapted to both humanity and nature.

Robert F. Young is codirector of the Sustainable Business Alliance and runs an organic farm in New York State.