A bit of a rant followed by some stuff about agroforestry and forest gardens!
“The Fertile Crescent – the rich agricultural zone stretching from Egypt to Iran, where farming, writing and the wheel first emerged – lies over the intersection of three plates.”
And here we go again, yet another article that perpetuates the myth that farming began in the fertile crescent. Grain farming did but agroforestry in the form of forest gardening most emphatically did not and it predated grain farming by millennia. So we continue on our merry way worshipping king wheat/oats/barley/rice/maize and spreading the origins lie to the next generation. Some more open minded farmers have started to shift towards agroforestry systems and some have even adopted agro-sylvo-pasturalist approaches. Basically putting the forest garden back into farming, or at least a bit.
At the same time we have people like George Monbiot who continue to attack livestock farming in all it’s forms. Not realising that many of our forests have burned because there are nowhere near enough herbivores in them. A similar thing can be said about urban and suburban areas. Compare the greenhouse gas emissions of lawnmowers when compared to grazing sheep and goats …… no contest.
When we have a quick glance around we can see that the infosphere is dominated by people expressing opinions on subjects they do not fully understand and that they have not properly studied. Thus is true for Presidents, Prime ministers as much as some influencer on instagram. The times when we come across good information linked to creative holistic solutions is frankly negligible. That said during a recent episode of the BBCs’ Inside Science “COP27 Loss and damage, Funding climate change impacts” a climate expert was invited to speak about methane emissions. It was so refreshing to hear someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
It’s unfortunate for the myriad protest groups that have sprung up over the last few years, and the earlier ones too. Out there in all weathers, shouting, gluing themselves to something, getting arrested, splattering ‘artworks’, being insulted. And for what? Trying to convince a minority who don’t know what they are doing to do something else and neither the one nor the other knows what that is.
Strategy:
Stop Oil : yes fine laudable but telling people to stop doing something is ineffective, showing them a better alternative is effective
Insulate Britain, yes great, but why are they asking the government to do it? We need to insulate houses and buildings now, so it’s better to nip back home and get on with it. Have a look at this documentary about a Dorze house
No Fly : yes indeed, flying is very bad for the climate. But again telling people what not to do doesn’t work very well whereas proposing something better can and does.
Stop Climate Chaos : as has been said so many times and heard so little, climate change is a symptom and not the cause. A hangover is a symptom and can be treated with an aspirin but the underlying cause was that party last night. Today’s’ socio-economic systems are the cause of climate change, transforming these will address the climate issues. Agriculture is a big culprit.
Back to agriculture
The number of unqualified people who get media coverage for their uninformed views is pretty astonishing. In some ways even worse are the experts who only grasp a part of the picture and try and force a half baked approach onto everyone. Take the ‘méga-bassines’ that are being constructed all over France as an example. They are each the size of several football pitches and can be up to 15 metres deep. The idea is to pump water from aquifers during the winter, stock the water in these massive structures and it will be used by farmers during the summer to irrigate. Well, at first view perhaps it sounds like a good idea but they are addressing a false problem and in a bad way. A lot of irrigation need can be reduced by cover crops, non-till systems, tree cover, and changing crops. This latter point is something that we will eventually have to do anyway as the planet heats up.
When a field is ploughed and planted in the usual way the soil drys out, when the soil is dry any summer rain will runoff even more as it infiltrates less well into dry soil. Ploughing destroys soil structure and oxidises the organic matter held in the soil matrix. This organic matter plays an important role in soil water retention, a good soil with plenty of organic matter can retain rainfall infiltration where a damaged soil cannot. These mega storages have large surface areas and will lose between 20 to 60% of the water through evaporation. They pump what the supporters of the approach call ‘excess winter water’ from already over-pumped aquifers. Most hydrologists will point out that aquifer recharge is necessary and that pumping it out will cause severe environmental damage to the whole system which includes streams and rivers.
In Permaculture we talk about holistic landscape management and approaches such as keyline. These are predominantly based around rainfall runoff control and soil storage. The systems, which include micro-dams, half-moons, swales, channels and keyline furrows have been tested and work. Someone may start shouting that these systems stop runoff into rivers but the excessive runoff we see today is caused by the absence of tress and bushes in the system. Before the land was cleared the forests slowed the rainfall and gave it time to percolate into the soil. The systems we create replicate this effect.
These mega storages are just one of far too many examples of simplistic and false solutions pushed by numerous ‘experts’ who will not or cannot see the whole picture.
Another major problem is that solutions that in their original form were well adapted are appropriated and deformed. Regenerative agriculture is a case in point, in it’s original form as developed by people like Darren Docherty, it is a holistic approach that can repair landscapes and turn them back into productive areas. It has however been appropriated by people who wish to continue large scale grass fed cattle farming in massive treeless fields which remains highly damaging to the environment.
Let’s be clear
Humans are not naturally adapted to a grain based diet. We are adapted to a mixed fruit, tuber, plant and cereal diet. We are not adapted to eating meat as frequently as many in ‘richer’ countries do. The major current agricultural model is destroying landscapes, it has a huge negative impact on the climate, on water resources, on animal welfare and on human health. It runs on oil, for the machines, for nitrogen fertiliser, for the production of the different chemical weapons used to ‘control’ pests and diseases and to transport the products to where they will be transformed. These transformed products are then transported again to retail outlets and people use their cars to go and buy them. Sustainable, not really, not at all.
The older agroforestry model is quite different, when you see a ploughed field or even a field with an annual crop in it and no trees you are looking at an outdated model that has no sophistication whatever.
We buy and sell farmland by the hectare or the acre, yields are often expressed in terms of tonnes per hectare. A forest doesn’t just cover a surface it also fills a volume. A field of wheat also fills a volume but it is a much smaller one than the forest. The volume extends into the soil and the same is true there. The wheat roots go down a certain distance, the tree roots go down much further. That said we are not a forest animal, we left them a long time ago but we continued to live around the edges of forests (and coastlines). We would range to harvest the plants, fruits and nuts that we needed and bring them back to our temporary camps, some seeds would germinate in our human manure and at some point we learnt to plant. We created or used clearings and filled them with mixes of fruit trees, bushes, tubers, climbing plants and edible leaf plants, these were what we now call forest gardens. They are highly productive and low maintenance, they are resilient and durable, they create a lot of the fertility they need and they are beautiful.
When people moved up into Europe after the end of the ice age (or more correctly the beginning of the current inter-glacial period) we found massive forests. It was once said that at even as recently as the early medieval period a squirrel could get from Madrid to Moscow without putting a foot on the ground. With fire and axes we opened clearings and created forest gardens. This whole approach was ultimately destroyed by grain agriculture, the forest were cut down and now we have enormous areas put to the plough and systematically wrecked.
It is time for us to get stop plough/grain agriculture and build new systems based on the ancient agroforestry model. We need to do this quickly and this is where the good-hearted climate protesters could be most effective, planting and tending local forest gardens. Producing a wide range of fruit, nuts, tubers, salads and small livestock. If they were up for introducing wild food plants to their local neighbourhood even better.
Agroforestry systems scale, they can be small enough to fit in a backgarden or scaled up to cover several hectares. It all depends on what the needs are and how the system is designed and then created. Smaller denser forest gardens at a scale of up to say a hectare or wider alley planted intercropped trees at a scale of multiple hectares.
By changing our agricultural systems we can draw down carbon from the atmosphere, reduce methane and nitrogen gas emissions. We can create productive perennial landscapes that are sanctuaries for a wide biodiversity and we can produce really nutritious food and diversify our diets. Healthy landscapes and healthy people, it isn’t rocket science, the various approaches have been tried and tested so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. All it takes is for us to go home and transform our neighbourhoods.