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Plagued by the plow

Imitation is the highest form of flattery. But when it comes to mirroring Mother Nature, agriculture shows no respect.

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Not so the indigenous food production patterns of Asia and Latin America. There, traditional agro-ecology, modelling many aspects of what we now call biomimicry, may show us the way to our oil-starved future.

What local cultures have learned in the mountainous and forested regions of Mexico, the Andes and Asia is that the process of getting food has as much to do with gathering and carrying as with cultivating.

The difference between North and South can be most easily understood from the number of F words describing what food procurers tend to. Here, farmers mostly cultivate in huge fields.

In the South, by contrast, peasant families make some of their living by cultivating small patches of land for rice and other food crops as well as fabrics such as cotton. But they supplement food crops by heading to the forest to forage for livestock fodder and fuel for the home fires, to fish in the marshes and collect other materials to increase the fertility of their ancient soils.

What this system doesn’t have much of is soil-disturbing annual ploughing or the earth-depleting planting of a small number of cereal grains that accounts in the North for most of the food consumed by humans and favoured livestock species.

Rather, traditional agro-ecology copies nature in favouring perennial plants: fruit and avocado trees, grasses, nut trees, berry bushes.

Lauren Baker, a pioneer rooftop gardener in Canada back in the 1990s and more recently the leader of Sustain Ontario, got to see agro-ecology up close while completing field research for her 2009 PhD thesis at York University.

She met with leaders of mostly indigenous small farmers in Michoacán, a state in western Mexico known for butterfly habitat, progressive politics and exports of avocado, mango, guava, lemon and lime.

Disappointed by their inability to get higher prices after converting to organic methods, farmers resorted to traditional methods that both lowered their production costs and increased the number of local jobs. Through the Michoacán Agribusiness Center, a series of family and co-op businesses provided organic fertilizers and pesticides from local materials – worm compost, bat guano, stinging nettle and the like – thereby cutting input costs by 70 per cent while creating local jobs.

Baker says this fits with agro-ecology because “it relies on looking close to home for solutions,” just as natural systems are forced to do.

“Nothing is wasted the waste from one process becomes input for another. The flow of energy and materials is circular, as in nature,” she says. “That’s why it can be described as a food web rather than a food chain.”

And this is the Northern challenge: breaking the vertical food chain by lateral thinking. The surge of interest in “grass-fed” livestock – returning livestock to the perennial grasses their ancestors ate before humans fattened them more quickly with annual cereal grains – comes from this paradigm.

Other versions may well follow when high gas and fertilizer (made from natural gas) prices kick in and when widespread drought in areas like the North American west makes grains too expensive to feed to cattle or cars. Foods obtained from perennial plants may be in for a comeback.

And while it’s not likely we’re going to stop cultivation, we can campaign for the restoration of swathes of southern Ontario’s Carolinian forest, destroyed for the plough.

Forests like these cleanse waterways, store carbon and are rich in nuts – a protein source not only for humans but for animal feed as well (think acorns instead of corn and wheat.) Ontario’s chestnuts could be exported with the same cachet as Brazil nuts from the Amazon.

Carolinian tracts provide building materials and berries and are natural sources of medicinal plants – wild ginseng was one of Canada’s major exports a few centuries back. Who knows? Governments may even subsidize farmers to extend forest regions on their land.

We don’t need a prophet to lead us out of the wilderness – we need one to lead us back.

news@nowtoronto.com

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