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Ecological Agriculture
ecological agriculture is not just another way of saying “Organic”. As well as striving to be 100% chemical free, it grows using more ecologically diverse systems that accomplish and maintain their own fertility.
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Key Features:
No artificial inputs of synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilisers
No genetically engineered seeds or plants
More diverse and airy growing systems used (polycultures)
Genetic diversity should be maintained, including agrarian plants and wildlife habitats
Pest control should be amiable to the all-embracing ecosystem
Growing methods should nourish and enrich the soil
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Ecological agriculture (also accepted as agroecology) builds and maintains soil fertility through advancement the appropriate mix of plant species (including nitrogen fixers) on the land all year round and makes more use of multifunctional copse and other perennial plants.
Mixed crops and other plants are often grown together in ‘polycultures’ – mixtures of accompaniment plants that benefit and support each other. Where single crops are grown alone, they are arranged in strips or mosaics with other plants, rather than huge monoculture fields – this helps reduce pest problems and also has many benefits.
Land is managed to maximise populations of beneficial soil microorganisms that accommodate fertility for the plants. In particular there is less disturbance of the soil through digging and ploughing.
Any fertilisers or sprays are made from natural plant abstracts or manures, such as compost teas or insect repellent teas made from neem or tobacco blade.
Ecological agriculture is natural-ecosystem-based farming.
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Ecological agriculture is absolutely sustainable – it can regenerate and refertilise the degraded and damaged Agricultural soils that cover a lot of of the world, and will acquiesce us to continue bearing food on that land indefinitely. Conventional agriculture degrades and depletes the soil, and so cannot continue to feed us.
The “progress” made in agriculture – adopting crop yields in the last 5 decades has come at an enormous environmental and amusing cost that is not sustainable.
Conventional farming methods have turned forests into deserts. Ecological agriculture does the adverse.
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Ecological agriculture can also outyield industrial agriculture – it can give a combined and around-the-clock yield from land, instead of one or two big monoculture harvests per year. And it is much more efficient in energy and financial agreement when we consider the amount and embodied energy of conventional farming’s chemical inputs. Ecological agriculture gives us a much better output for our ascribe.
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This has all been proven and agreed aloft by the best independent (not paid by the big chemical and berry companies) agricultural researchers in the world (not just the western academics).
In 2009 the UN-sponsored International Assessment on Agricultural Science and Technology in Development (IAASTD) report was appear, the result of several years work by over 400 of the worlds top independent advisers compiling affirmation from bags of analysis projects and case studies around the world.
Halfway through writing the report, the biotechnology/GMO companies withdrew their accord from the report because they realised the report was not going to endorse genetic modification of crops and their associated chemical intensive systems, and that its findings and opinions threatened their business interests and the whole chemical industrial agricultural archetype.
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The IAASTD address recommends that ecological agriculture is the alone way in which we will be able to continue to feed the current apple citizenry.
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You can read the IAASTD arbitrary and the whole report by clicking here:
The need for Sustainable Agriculture is so assured, even the UN has to accept it.
“Agroecology outperforms all-embracing automated agriculture for all-around food security,” says UN able. — The United Nations Office at Geneva (<- click here)
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In an article (aboriginal appear 22 June 2010), UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Professor Olivier De Schutter “makes an airtight case for a global policy shift against agroecological production.”
Along with 25 of the world’s most acclaimed experts on agroecology, the UN expert apprenticed the all-embracing community to re-think current agricultural policies and build on the abeyant of agroecology.
The widest study anytime conducted on agroecological approaches (Jules Pretty, Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Essex, UK) covered 286 projects in 57 developing countries, representing a absolute surface of 37 actor hectares: the boilerplate crop yield gain was 79%. Concrete examples of ‘agroecological success stories’ abound in Africa. —The United Nations Office at Geneva
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You can apprehend 2 excellent online writing about this issue on the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia’s website by beat here:
NEED FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE ADMITTED BY UN
and
THE FOOD CRISIS: “A PERFECT STORM” – AND HOW TO TURN THE TIDE
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Ecological Agriculture is not just another way of adage “organic”. It is traveling above organic. There are abounding means to call this, and the diagram beneath gives a broad idea of some of the key aspects (please let us apperceive if you anticipate we have forgotten any!)
Beyond Organic
In the USA a abstraction found that organic tomatoes in California had a worse environmental appulse than non-organic (chemically fertilized) tomatoes because they consumed far more baptize and simply substituted chemical fertiliser for compost made from accepted dairy manure – and the beasts were fed on maize and soya, the production of which also had a top ecology impact. The soil was still ploughed and left bare in the baking sun and the tomatoes were developed in a monoculture.
This is a great example of how applying monoculture cerebration to organic growing (or application the organic characterization as a bolt-on to business-as-usual farming) doesn’t work. We can do so much better.
Biodiversity rich
Biodiversity is more than just something that’s nice to have in nature reserves. We need it in our farms too. Crop diversity helps growing systems to be more abiding and more productive than monocultures, less affected by pests and diseases, and even more resilient to flooding and droughts.
As well as growing a variety of crops in circling, we can grow more things together in ‘polyculture’. This can mean literally mixing things up in the same bed – so called ‘companion planting’ – and also row cropping things that grow better on their own, so there are alternating patches and strips instead of big fields of the same thing. This mosaic blueprint helps to increase the beneficial ‘edge effect’ which gives us microclimates, humidity traps, and added abode to wildlife, which helps to control and antithesis pest insects (so called ‘integrated pest management’).
Growing plants together in this way helps them to allotment nutrients and benefit anniversary other. A variety of plant acme aloft ground also equals a variety of root abyss below ground, which gives a host website for soil microorganisms and helps to advance soil fertility. Ultimately, it is soil bacillus biodiversity that determines soil fertility – it is they who make the nutrients and minerals available to the plants. When we reduce assortment aloft ground, this often has bad effects for assortment below ground too, authoritative us more abased on external inputs to maintain a fertile and productive system.
Chemical Free
This is a no-brainer for so many reasons, and I am abiding you don’t need this answer to you. We won’t even bother to go into pesticides and herbicides here: that is SO last century. But what about chemical fertilizers?
Most fertilizer is fabricated from synthetic petro-chemicals or gas, or mined (in the case of phosphate) from annihilative and non-renewable sources. Rock phosphate and guano are not technically actinic, but we shall cover them here because they are concentrated, unsustainable, environmentally destructive in their extraction, and ultimately unnecessary.
Application of chemical fertiliser provides the 3 major nutrients plants need for advance – N, P, and K – but none of the micro-nutrients. They are like plant steroids – and we all know what happens to body builders after on in life.
Here is the account of some joyous things that chemical fertilizers bring us:
Excessive energy burning. 2% of the world’s entire energy consumption is acclimated to make ammonia, much of which is acclimated to make N fertilizers Loss of fertile alluvium
Loss of organic admixture content in soil
Reduced porosity of top soil
Nitrate abuse of waterways
Phosphate pollution of waterways
Desertification
Poisoning of people bistro plants containing boundless levels of inorganic salts (built up from long term fertilizer use)
Blue-baby syndrome (methemoglobinemia) and abortion in pregnant women caused by nitrate abuse of bubbler water
Heavy metal pollution of soils causing poisoning and blight – mercury, lead, cadmium and uranium
Fertilizer burn – caused by too much fertilizer being applied, resulting in a dehydration out of the roots and damage or even afterlife of the plant, as well as killing the soil microorganisms that cause fertility.
Trace mineral depletion of the soil. Because most chemical fertilizer programs don’t contain these elements in the soil, they gradually get depleted by crops. Iron and Zinc deficiencies are common in soil over-loaded with non-dissolving P. Various diseases in livestock including Grass Tetany, Milk fever, Grass staggers, Scouring, Ill Thrift and a whole ambit of metabolic disorders. Ditto for humans eating mineral-empty foods – see all of the so alleged “diseases of civilisation”.
Depletion of non-renewable natural resources. Phosphorous comes from rocks which are bound in supply. Nitrogen is made from fossil fuels.
Eutrophication of Waterways
Loss of biodiversity in the ocean
Soil Acidification
Toxic assiduous organic compounds – Dioxins, polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), and polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs) have been detected in fertilizers and soil amendments
Radioactive poisoning. Highly-radioactive Polonium-210 in phosphate fertilizers
Increased Greenhouse Gases. Nitrous Oxide is the 3rd most important GHG because of the excessive use of chemical N fertilizers
Increased annoyance problems caused by boundless nitrogen fertilizer applications
Death, injury and environmental damage caused anon by the manufacture of chemical fertilizers
Higher than normal ante of Cancer in bodies living abutting to phosphate mining operations
And there are affluence more reasons that we didn’t include here because we don’t have the space – a full explanation would need several books. Basically, white powders were never allotment of nature’s plan. They have just been a prop to adjournment the inevitable demise of farming that breaks natures fertility cycles.
The capital affair to remember is that we can get all the fertility we need to grow food without accepting to aerosol the land with chemicals, or dairy cattle manure for that matter. We just need to stop destroying the natural fertility-building processes in the land we are growing in (which conventional agriculture does with arresting ability).
Nobody fertilizes a forest, and yet forests have the highest rates of biomass production of any plant system on the planet, and create a affluent and fertile soil. How is this possible?
There are many fertility-building functions within nature that we can mimic, harness and use in our farming systems that will accord us all the counterbalanced abundance we need from healthy plants and microorganisms, and accredit us to adorn our soil every year, rather than destroy it. This understanding, which we outline in the next section, is a cornerstone of ecological agriculture, and is why more complex “polyculture” systems are bare that accumulate these natural functions in good working order. Conventional, and even many organic monocultures have no approaching.
Benefits and Integrates with Nature
Natural ecosystems accomplish many important ecological functions such as: cycling water and nutrients; cleaning water and air; storing energy; and generating topsoil. These are called ‘ecosystem services’ and we all depend on them to live.
Often, agriculture displaces accustomed ecosystems and interrupts these important cycles and processes. Taken on a global scale, this has severe implications . Agriculture is the #1 cause of deforestation, soil loss and desertification. It is imperative that we start to implement on a large scale, agro-ecosystems that complete ecosystem functions as well as accouterment us with food.
Ultimately, unless we realise that we are a part of nature, rather than abstracted from it, and start to design our animal systems accordingly, humans will not survive on this planet. Agriculture is by far the largest breadth of human managed land on the earth, and has the biggest potential to change the biosphere: for better or worse.
Enriches land rather than degrading it
Following on from the previous section, how do we account and integrate with nature? So much of the land we start with has been degraded, absolutely everywhere that has been arably farmed or had intensive livestock on it. Topsoil has been lost and land has been compacted, stripped of biodiversity, chemically farmed and much of agronomical land can be justifiably described as a green arid.
It is not enough anymore to leave a band of hedgerow around the fields for nature while we plough on regardless in the acreage. We need agricultural practices that turn things around and go in the other administration – that regenerate the land. We need to:
Build soil carbon and create topsoil
Build soil fertility by itself by increasing life in the soil
Establish useful stores of energy and biodiversity in dense and diverse vegetation.
Give a range of useful products over the year, rather than only one or two major crops a year.
Passively harvest and absorb water.
There are some key aspects that we acquisition in ecological agriculture systems that alter from accustomed western practice. Don’t worry if you are not doing all of this already – we wish to plan with people who are interested in alive appear this and want to apprentice more. We can advice with training and education from the UK permaculture affiliation.
No Dig
Repeated and routine digging and plowing disturbs and over-aerates the soil, depleting the populations of micro-organisms that normally (in nature) create and build soil fertility. Imagine a city full of busy, productive businesses. Then brainstorm it afterwards a above earthquake. That is what digging and plowing does to the soil.
Also, too abundant digging and plowing increases the oxidisation of amoebic amount to gasses into the air – this means the carbon goes up into the atmosphere as Co2, rather than into the soil as biological compounds. Occasional agronomics for de-compaction is sometimes advantageous, at the start of renovating acreage – but this involves ‘ripping’ and opening the soil, not antagonism ploughing where the top 50cm is angry upside down. We call this ‘earth surgery’, as the earth is absolutely a living animal, and it is not a acceptable abstraction to do it too often!
Less bare soil
The only places we see bare soil in nature is an area of recent disturbance (which is bound colonised by ‘weeds’) or a desert.
This should tell us something: that attributes doesn’t like abandoned space and will fill it. If we want to fight adjoin this it costs us lots of work. Instead, we can plant densely to ample all the amplitude.
Another key feature of many permaculture and agro-ecological systems is mulching. This mimics the leaf litter found everywhere in nature, agriculture the soil organisms that create fertility, creating topsoil and attention it from drying out and from frosts. There is some debate in the wet UK as to whether this encourages slug pests in the vegetable garden, and there are undoubtedly a few things that need to be grown without mulch, but the broad principle has been found to be awful beneficial in the UK – another of nature’s cycles that we can accept not to arrest.
Using more perennial plants
Trees, bushes and other abiding plants do not need as much affliction as annual plants do, and they are more energy able ways of producing food. Their roots go deeper and bring up more nutrients. They build topsoil in their leaf litter. They appear into leaf and production in the bounce faster than annuals because they already have an absolute root system.
Trees
Related to the above point. Trees are multifunctional elements that do so many beneficial things, as well as giving us bake-apple, nuts and balk. The UK was already covered in forest, which built our topsoil over thousands of years. Most of this was originally austere for livestock agriculture.
Ecological agriculture systems generally use agroforestry that integrates strips of annual crops as able-bodied (so-called ‘alley cropping’), so that our farms look added like a mosaic of clearings in a forest, rather than a few hedges about big fields.
In the UK we can architecture these to accomplish the best use of accessible ablaze, create benign micro climates for growing and get a lot more outputs for beneath work. An accomplished UK ability is the Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon: http://www.agroforestry.co.uk/
Climate change aggressive
You don’t need me to tell you that climate change is causing more aberrant weather patterns. From hurricane force winds and abundant rains and flooding, to continued baking dry spells; from severe cold winters one year, again balmy balmy winters the next.
Ecological agriculture systems, abnormally those that use more tree cover, are much more resilient to the effects of these shocks. They act as buffers – big sponges of organic matter that soak up water, and adhere assimilate it for use in dry times.
They are more close and full of sheltered pockets that can resist winds and moderate extremes of temperature to give beneficial micro-climates that help plants to grow better and with less stress. Woodlands are warmer in winter and acknowledgment and more boiling in summer.
Minimise fossil fuel dependency
When asked the catechism “Can permaculture feed the world?” permaculture expert Patrick Whitefield answered “That’s a good question. But a better question is ‘can business as usual feed the world’? I think anybody knows that it can’t”.
One of the reasons it can’t is its massive annex on fossil fuels for fertiliser, mechanisation, transport, and irrigation. Global demand for oil is increasing, while every year we are able to abstract less. Oil is acceptable increasingly difficult and costly to get at, and gas is also in decline.
The results are war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ecological confusion caused by tar sands mining in Canada and the abysm of Mexico oil discharge. We need to get off this addiction and advance a better way of doing things.
Ecological agriculture is much more energy efficient. Systems are alluringly ‘net energy positive’ – that is, less units of human, beastly and fossil energy go into the growing system than units of useful energy come out of it (as food or fuel or soap!). The positive yield is in fact solar energy that the plants have captured for us. The opposite is true of conventional systems, which are massively energy inefficient and use 10 calories of energy (of ancient sunlight!) for every 1 calorie of energy in the food.
Ecological agriculture achieves this energy efficiency advantage by creating a much more sophisticated system of energy accessories in complex plant systems. Conventional agriculture by allegory is wasteful and simply advised – a monoculture – that does not make the most of available solar energy.