[Scpg] Fwd: Ending 10 000 Years of Conflict between Agriculture and

[lakinroe at silcom.com]

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    Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2008 12:42:01 +0100 (BST)
    From: press-release at i-sis.org.uk
Reply-To: press-release at i-sis.org.uk
 Subject: Ending 10 000 Years of Conflict between Agriculture and 
      To: lakinroe at silcom.com

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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). 


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