[Ccpg] Ending 10 000 Years of Conflict between Agriculture and and Nature

Mon Jun 30 19:29:36 PDT 2008

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Ending 10 000 Years of Conflict between Agriculture and
Nature
***************************************************
***************************************************

Organic agriculture is not enough; we must replace annual
with perennial crops.

Dr. Stan Cox

Humans now directly manage 27 percent of the Earth's surface
area, harvesting more than 40 percent of the planet's
biological productivity for our own uses. Yet food
production per person is on the decline, and agriculture
worldwide is doing more than ever to worsen the global
ecological crisis. Like the Hindu god Shiva, today's
agriculture is both a creator and a destroyer, partly as the
consequence of conscious decisions taken by farmers,
agribusiness executives, government officials, and food
buyers. But the productivity and ecological impact of
agriculture are also inherent in the crops and cropping
methods that humans have relied upon for 10 000 years.

The problem of agriculture
**************************

Since its inception, agriculture has relied on annual plants
that are grown from seed every year and harvested for their
seed. That requires tilling of the soil, which can be done
on a small scale without causing great harm, as in small,
intensively hand-managed plots or on annually flooded land
along a river. But every civilization that has practised
tillage on a large scale has suffered the often catastrophic
consequences of soil erosion [1, 2]. Industrialization has
compounded the problem through burning fossil fuels and
chemical contamination.

The world's natural landscapes are covered mostly by
perennial plants growing in mixed stands [3], w hereas more
than two-thirds of global cropland is sown to monocultures
of annual crops . Conversion from natural to agricultural
landscapes dramatically alters ecological conditions. Across
the planet, more land has been converted from perennial to
annual cover since 1950 than in the previous 150 years. This
recent expansion of cropland has made it more and more
necessary to apply chemical fertilizers and pesticides,
which disrupt natural nutrient cycles and erode biodiversity
[4, 5].

Perennial plants are highly efficient and responsive
micromanagers of soil, nutrients, and water. Annual crops
are not; they require churning of the soil, precisely timed
inputs and management, and favourable weather at just the
right time. With shorter growing seasons and ephemeral,
often small root systems, annual crops provide less
protection against soil erosion, wasting water and
nutrients, storing less carbon below ground, and are less
tolerant of pests than are perennial plant communities [6].

Today, vast swaths of entire continents have been scoured of
their perennial vegetation, leaving the soil uncovered for a
good part of the year. Even when the soil is covered during
the growing season and even under organic management,
lightly rooted annual crops fail to manage water and
nutrients the way their deeply- and densely-rooted,
persistent perennial antecedents did. Agriculture's
destruction of perennial root systems has wrecked entire
underground ecosystems, subtracting from the soil much of
what makes it soil.

Agriculture is a problem older than history. It has always
depended largely on annual grass and legume species that
humans domesticated between 5000 and 10 000 years ago. That
domestication of annuals set in motion a somewhat ironic
series of events. First, annual grain crops made
civilization both possible and necessary. Much later,
civilization - largely through exploitation of fossil fuels
and synthetic chemicals - created conditions under which
agriculture could become both extraordinarily productive and
ecologically destructive. But today, it is the fruits of the
very civilization made possible by agriculture - scientific
knowledge, data, and techniques - that have clearly revealed
to us both the necessity and the possibility of correcting
the well-intentioned wrong turn our species made 10 000
years ago [7](Jackson, 1980).

Read the rest of this article here
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Ending10000YearsOfConflict.php

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