Introduction Agriculture is central to human existence: to our nourishment, livelihoods, and cultures. Advances in agriculture have driven human civilizations for millennia. Nevertheless, agriculture is also currently the single greatest source of negative impact that humans have on the planet. It consumes enormous quantities of resources, displaces vast areas of natural ecosystems, and generates enough pollution to dramatically alter global nutrient and atmospheric cycles. One of the primary challenges we face in the coming few decades is to reinvent and redeploy agriculture as a sustainable industry. The United Nations estimates that by the year 2050, we might have as many as 14 billion people living on our planet. This is roughly twice our current population. Our planet isn’t getting bigger, Imagining Sustainable Agriculture and our standards of living, including the complexities of our diets, have only continued to increase. We must begin to think creatively about how to double the output of food production. Agricultural systems will need to efficiently produce healthy and nutritious food as well as provide economic value and satisfying employment. They will need to do this without placing an unmanageable burden on our natural environment. In this report we describe an approach that we believe could evolve into an innovative and truly sustainable form of agriculture: a new greenhouse production method called Polydome. The Polyculture Greenhouse Polydome is a polyculture system, which means that unlike most existing forms of greenhouse production, it has many crop and livestock species growing at once. In the model we describe here, we have included around 50 plant crops, two mushroom crops, chickens, a fish aquaculture component, and several cultivated insect populations (honey bees, worms, and support habitats for other beneficial insects). Rather than trying to maintain absolute control over the process of cultivation, as is currently the case in greenhouse agriculture, the Polydome system is designed to function more like a natural ecosystem, with selfsupporting plant and animal interactions. Such a polyculture system is capable of greatly reducing the environmental impact associated with food production, maintaining the high levels of productivity characteristic of Dutch greenhouses, and also providing a number of economic and social benefits. Environmental Benefits On the level of physical impacts, Polydome allows “wastes” created within the system to be reused 8 Pagina 7

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