When we visit the doctor we know there is not one prescription that is suitable for all of us. We also recognize there is no diet, exercise regime, or amount of sleep that works the same for everyone. Farmers can make the same analogy with land. One approach to land management will be different from one farm to another. Why then put agriculture into two groups, conventional and organic, without seeing differences in the landscape?
I understand very well that certified organic creates an alternative market for food companies and an opportunity for farmers to earn more by following a set of standards. But, for people to believe organic standards are suitable for all farms is naive. At the same time to think all conventional agriculture poisons the environment is irresponsible. The truth is there is no single approach to grow safe, nutritious, and affordable food for everyone.
In the last fifty years, two great advances are worth highlighting. One, we developed chemicals and plants to produce abundant amounts of food. And two, we created a viable alternative with organic agriculture and successfully communicated the principles of organic agriculture to the masses. In the next fifty years, I believe we will need to integrate these advances to support our population and adapt to the future.
The difficulty for the majority of us lies in our separation from the field. We all met agriculture everyday with the price we pay for groceries and the food we eat. But, we know little about who grows our food and where it comes from. I encourage you, like a visit to the doctor, to ask questions, seek out different opinions, and educate friends and family. This way you too can be a part of an integrative agriculture that serves our future needs.
Maybe we should develop a pill (prescription) so that anyone can eat poisoned food without getting sick. Or maybe we could develop TV commercials for the food we ingest, just like the pills we ingest, with the subtitles for all the possible side effects and where it was grown and what is safe for a certain crop grown in/at certain ways or according to location. But first, how do we get people to care?
The crucial thing to realize is that when everyone is cultivating the home garden again, the same way we are bound to our money earning jobs now. Then the pressure will begin to ease, the subconscious feeling creeping in on us now. How will we eat without the food trucks, how will we drink without the water trucks.
It is an important growth point for each individual. I just lived 3 months in The Andes of Peru. Everyone has a garden, grows food, collectively farms larger field crops. Each family knows that with or without money, they have potatoes, beans, corn, vegetables… Fruit from fruit trees, water from the streams that can be boiled.
In future generations, when we have returned this inherent wisdom to our own culture, rather than modernizing and agro-industrializing everything. Then a feeling of freedom will be restored that our current culture isn’t able to enjoy. A world where food can be found without dollars, and people can rest easy knowing that food and money don’t have to go hand in hand.
Water is a whole other thing….
There is definitely opportunity for both conventional and organic foods. However, the reality is that our population is expected to double by 2050. Technology, including the “evil chemicals” referenced by some, has allowed us to feed more people. Agriculture is unable to continue that role unless technology continues its important role in food production.
Farms of today look different than 50 years ago, just as they’ll look different in 50 years from now. That’s called progress. As countries become wealthier, there are fewer people with any real connection to farming and ranching (only 1.5% of U.S. population). That gap is widened by a multi-million dollar activist industry that is against modern agriculture.
I personally don’t buy the hoopla put out by the organic movement, given the fact that many food processors and retailers are profiting from marketing misinformation. For example, organics have 8x higher E Coli contamination rates. It’s a niche, in my opinion. Having said that, I’d concur that a successful agrifood system would involve both.
Integrative agriculture is definitely meant for the future.
Especially with the growth in population we need both.
There has been some amazing stuff done with transitional agriculture and community food systems out here in the midwest. People are producing huge amounts of food with little land or inputs beyond hard work and experiental knowledge.
Though some might scare us with population figures, there are two things to consider here. First, that more importantly than population issues are consumption issues. We learned about this in an Ecology course. How people consume their food, how much of what kinds, and how much they waste are very important factors for considering the future of transitional agriculture.
Also, it is being shown that sustainable agriculture methods are able to produce far more produce than was imagined as it began to re-emerge. Interestingly enough, a study was recently done that showed that conventional agriculture in Mexico is often producing less than what even the indigenous campesinos and milpa farmers produced then. Much success has been had in sustainable development practice of re-invigorating depleted soil resources with indigenous swidden agriculture methods.
In Illinois, they are putting into the works a project to produce vast amounts of sustainably produced food for the region. Its intended to produce hundreds of thousands of jobs, bring 500 billion in economic revenue in the state, and revitalize community food infrastrucuture for schools, institutions, to rebuild regional distribution networks (my ancestors were a part of these!) and processing facilities. Moving beyond the farmers market, these systems are rapidly moving to replace much of the activity of the industrial supply chain. The goal is 20% by 2020, though with the important infrastructure slated to be developed in the next 5 or 7 years, that could easily be 30 to 40 by then, with much of the rest coming from elsewhere in the region.
Community food systems are already beginning to revitalize rural economies by increasing the demand for on farm labor, and the safety of it, as well as creating jobs in infrastructure building and maintenance as well as distribution and processing networks. Marketing, nutrition, adult education, child education, systems engineering, and even regional planning are all beginning to become important fields to Community Food Systems and that potential will soon become a reality.
There is no question that IPM, Biointensive sustainable agriculture is a very viable part of our future. It is hard to prove that carefully phasing out petrochemicals or natural gas based chemicals will remain economically feasible in the long run, as both petrol and natural gas resources are quickly depleting. Research is being stepped up to replace these inputs and to fundamentally redesign the way agriculture is done.
I look towards my great grandfather for inspiration. He was a producer of fruits and dairy in a food system that supplied the city of St. Louis with all of the food it needed, at a time when its population was larger than it is even today. They had it really well figured out and prided themselves on their self sufficiency and community interdependence. They all grew all their own food and enough to go to market for all the factory workers, railroad workers, the dockworkers, the clerks, the businessmen, the millions of families that called st. louis home. With that extra money they were able to buy machinery, own businesses, build more buildings and expand thier on farm enterprises. He used to make all the shingles for the region with a steam powered mill. He made his own fencing by hand. He had a huge diesel truck that he would load with produce from his farm and the neighbors farms to take to Soulard Market in st. louis, or nearby markets, or to the railroad station to be sold to market in kansas city or chicago. It worked for them. And now, we know how to do it better, more sustainably and more efficiently. And we know what market forces cause farmers to make bad decisions, and with a true free market to bolster regional economies we can work around them.
Organic agriculture (OA) is not just certified OA, it is much more, basically sustainable agric. So what should be the difference with integrative agric? To ignore the difference between organic and industrial/chemical agric doesn’t help anybody.