Permaculture is a profoundly holistic approach. Permaculture designers think holistically and in terms of systems, flows and interactions.
This is really what we need and faced with multiple crises the best if not only way forward. Great stuff but also profoundly frustrating at times, I recall that old chestnut about four blindfolded people feeling an elephant and each one coming up with a different idea about what it is they’re feeling. Add in another person, a Permaculture designer who took the blindfold off. This person now has to try and explain to the others that their analyses are wrong. Why? Because they are extrapolating a whole image from just one part of the elephant.
Lots of research flows out of different laboratories and from different scientific teams. Some of them are communicating with each other but others don’t. Some are multi-disciplinary and others aren’t. Few are truly holistic and the same is true of politicians, lobbies and frankly most people.
Take as a case in point the linear projection that food production has to double over the next couple of decades. This hypothesis is based on the idea that a growing population needs more food to be produced. This sounds completely logical, at a family level an extra child is an another mouth to feed so the family needs to buy more food. At a global level it seems logical too, adding another billion people to the planetary load means a billion more people to feed. But at both levels there are parameters which mean that things aren’t linear and straightforward, this means we have to think eco-systemically, holistically and in terms of flows, interactions and systems.
Some researchers at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research have done some modelling about wheat. Their results seem to demonstrate that nitrogen fertilization in wheat cultivation will have to increase up to fourfold over the next few years. Why? Because a growing global population will need more food.
Let us look at this from a Permaculture point of view, that is to say holistically.
Quantity versus quality. There is mounting evidence that modern varieties of wheat are less nutritious than ancient varieties. Kamut is a genotype of Khorasan wheat and is considered an ancient form. A study showed that a Kamut diet (compared to durum and bread wheats resulted in “significant reductions in metabolic risk factors (total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, blood glucose), improved redox status, increased serum potassium and magnesium and significant reductions in circulating levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines”.
Another study showed that “Kamut flour had a significantly higher % amylose in starch (34.50% compared with 28.12%), higher protein content (16.36% compared with 13.98%) and higher contents of “antioxidant phytochemicals “(polyphenols, carotenoids, flavonoids) and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) antiradical activity. The Kamut semolina and flour also contained significantly higher levels of minerals.”
Nitrogen fertiliser tends to change the composition of the wheat produced. For example it leads to higher protein content but the composition of the protein has changed containing higher proportions of gluten storage proteins and of gliadin proteins. These, and particularly the gluten, are less digestible and thus less nutritive.
The researchers above were studying modern high-yielding varieties which have a high nitrogen demand. A flaw in their approach then is to prioritise total yield without sufficiently considering total nutritional content.
Wastage. A study in Sweden showed that 80,000 tons per year, or about 8 kg per person per year is simply wasted. The per capita consumption of bread and pastries in Sweden amounted to roughly 76 kilograms so about 10% is lost. This is less than the UNEP estimates of 17% of total food available to consumers in 2019, went into the waste bins of households, retailers, restaurants and other food services.
Add to this the 13% that is wasted in the supply chain and we can conclude that if we wasted less we wouldn’t need to produce as much.
Where will the nitrogen come from? The authors point out that “In wheat, only 48% of the fertilizer applied is taken up by the crop. The rest of the applied nitrogen, a large proportion, leaches into the soil or is emitted into the air. This excess nitrogen fertilization pollutes water quality, leads to high greenhouse gas emissions and is a major driver of biodiversity loss.” Their proposed solution to this is to breed wheat varieties that are ‘better’ at taking up nitrogen. The problem here is, once again, a lack of holistic thinking.
Fixating on one thing, nitrogen take-up, means overlooking the consequences to other parameters. As shown above out modern varieties are already less nutritious than the ancient forms.
The authors mention wheat/clover cultures as a partial solution but they are unconvinced that such a change would help ‘feed the world’. However the synthetic N fertiliser supply chain “was responsible for estimated emissions of 1.13 GtCO2e in 2018, representing 10.6% of agricultural emissions and 2.1% of global GHG emissions.” Not good.
Climate, back to the “we need to increase wheat production to feed a growing population”. Many countries have passed peak population and are in or headed towards population contraction. Population growth is still happening in a some areas, for example in Africa.
Most areas of the African continent are not adapted to wheat production. So what’s the idea then? Produce more wheat in areas where it is possible and export to Africa? This creates reliance on imports, has negative environmental consequences and increases food wastage.
A bit of an aside. In the Jewish and Christian traditions the “forbidden fruit” was an apple. ‘Apple’ was, up until the 17 century, a word that was used to describe all types of fruit, nuts and other things. Eorþæppla, literally meant "earth-apples" but was used to name cucumbers. Seyyed Hossein Nasr points out that in Islamic tradition the forbidden fruit was, you guessed it, wheat. In Botany the wheat kernel is a caryopsis, a type of fruit :-)
Research is being done all over the world, to find ways to increase yields, to discover new ways to protect crop plants from pathogens etc etc. We regularly see headlines like “exciting new possibilities for engineering immunity in major crops which are facing a growing threat from emerging and rapidly evolving pathogens exacerbated by climate change”.
Some researchers have developed a hydrogel which is added to soil itself “A newly engineered type of soil can capture water out of thin air to keep plants hydrated and manage controlled release of fertilizer for a constant supply of nutrients.” Am I excited about this? Not really, it’s another industrial product designed to help failing agricultural systems and moreover it’s not needed. Increasing soil organic matter, biochar, cover crops, mulch do the same thing and free farmers from further reliance on polluting industries.
Yes, climatic forcing is changing the environmental conditions and growing our staple crops is becoming harder in many places around the world. But: