Beyond Monoculture V.2 • Improper soil management and irrigation are leading to widespread desertification, salinification, and erosion of soils. A great deal of modern agriculture is now reliant on non-renewable resources, such as fossil fuels (required for the manufacturing of chemicals and the operation of machinery), and phosphorus, a finite mineral deposit. it becomes a waste product, much of it ending up accidentally in water streams. Meanwhile, farmers with field crops rely increasingly on chemical fertilizers made of fossil fuels. This separation of agricultural crops and livestock into distinct units reflects an underlying trend in modern food production. Our basic approach to agriculture in this latest era has been reductionist: we have attempted to simplify it to its basic elements and control these elements to the best of our ability. To each problem we have responded with a unique technological solution - pests get pesticides, weeds get herbicides. As part of this controlled strategy, rather than using naturally occurring inputs, we have tried to synthesize each input with chemical precision. We now feed natural gas to our crops and concoctions of bone meal and enhanced soy to our cattle. One of the problems with this approach is that we didn’t necessarily know what all the important flows were in the system to begin with, so it is difficult to reconstruct them “correctly.” In a natural ecosystem, healthy soil organisms can improve nutrient uptake by up to ten fold.8 We exchange this uncharted complexity in favor of more sterile soils which require ten times the application of synthetic chemicals. Likewise, in ecological farming, completely eradicating pests is seen as a mistake; without at least some pests, you can 8 Hawken, P Lovins, A., and Lovins, H.L, (1999), “Natural ., capitalism: creating the next industrial revolution”, New York: Little, Brown, and Company never cultivate a population of predators to keep them in check. By stripping it of all its complexity, and assuming that we can fill the gaps with synthesized inputs, we create new problems along the way. A New Way Forward None of this is to say that we should idealize the simpler approach to agriculture of our agrarian past; a time when most people toiled from morning to night in order to manage their small subsistence farms. Pre-industrial farming left much to be desired in terms of yields, labor requirements, and most other factors against which successful agriculture can be measured, including environmental impact. It is clear that aside from reducing our reliance on monocultures, we also need to increase the efficiency of agricultural output per unit of fresh water, land, and energetic input. We must find ways to be more productive, meeting the demands of an everincreasing population, while reducing the impact of our growing footprint. This challenge requires a new way of thinking. The Polydome concept shows how we can move away from monocultures without regressing into the past. By combining the unique benefits of greenhouses with the many untapped opportunities of polycultures, we create a system that maximizes production density and diversity to a greater degree than any other food production system. • Certainly, monocultural production is not the only source of agriculture’s environmental burden, however, it either exacerbates or is directly related to many of these problems. Modern Agriculture: A Reductionist Approach On a fundamental level, monocultural production leads to disconnected material flows. A single plant or animal has a demand for specific inputs (nutrients, water, gases) and produces certain kinds of outputs. When there are many plants and animals together, the wastes of one become the inputs of another, creating a closed material cycle. For example, manure from cattle enriches fields so Apples that livestock can continue to graze on the emerging grasses. When we separate the different elements of such interacting systems into distinct units, the material flows between them are suddenly disconnected and thrown out of balance. Manure from monocultural animal production facilities is suddenly located too far from any field farming to be worth the cost of transport. Instead of being used as a valuable source of nutrients to replenish the soil, Polydome: High Performance Polyculture Systems 15 Pagina 14
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