Sustainable Farming

This is a bit late, but in case you haven't read it, the September 2008 issue of National Geographic has a very interesting feature story about soils around the world, the rapid degradation we're causing, and the efforts around the world to improve farming that did and didn't work out:

In the first—and still the most comprehensive—study of global soil misuse, scientists at the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC) in the Netherlands estimated in 1991 that humankind has degraded more than 7.5 million square miles of land. Our species, in other words, is rapidly trashing an area the size of the United States and Canada combined.
...
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to reengineer the world's bad soils. "Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root," Lal says. "In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil."

There are, of course, beautiful and poignant photographs accompanying the article.

One of the major costs in conventional farming is the continuous manual or mechanical work required. In sustainable farming practices any unnecessary activity is consciously designed out. We've already seen how the functions of tilling and pest control are achieved by employing natural services, and how features of the land are employed to minimize labour and energy requirements.

In permaculture design, the zone system is used to minimize the effort required in managing and harvesting the farm.

On a sustainable farm with a lot of different plants and animals, some need more frequent attention and harvesting than others. These should be placed closer to the home to make it easier to visit them. Zones are a way of guiding this layout scheme:

Zone	Purpose	Need for Activity
0	Home
1	Leafy vegetables, herbs, strawberries, plant nursery, work area	Multiple times a day
2	Smaller fruit trees, fruit vegetables, beehives, chickens, compost bin	Once a day
3	Main crop for domestic consumption and sale, food forest	Once a week
4	Semi-wild foraging zone with large trees, mushrooms, firewood, grazing animals	Once a week
5	Protected natural area/wilderness for observation and learning only	Never

One of the few bits of knowledge I will remember forever from when I was studying to be a metallurgist* can be summarized** as:

The action is always at the interfaces.

The interfaces, or edges, between two different systems are an extremely important concept when setting up a sustainable agricultural system too. Due to the sudden change in system properties, interfaces are highly active zones, with energy and materials continuously in flux. Life takes advantage of these energy and material exchanges, and thrives far more easily at these discontinuities than in the more homogenous interior of an area. For example, the most biodiverse and productive sites in an ocean are near the shores as well as where cold and warm ocean currents meet. Comparatively, the open ocean is akin to the Sahara desert in terms of biodiversity and productivity.

In permaculture design, increasing the amount of edges is an important tool for maximizing the productivity of a farm. Specifically, ponds are designed with an irregular shape (as opposed to circular) to maximize the water's edge. Wooded and grassland areas are intermingled. Of course, since the biodiversity is high in any area, there are a lot of micro-interfaces where different organisms interact. All of this improves the resource efficiency and productivity of the designed ecosystem.

The corollary is reducing the interface area when you want to minimize material use and energy exchange. For example, spherical structures have the least surface areas for a given volume, and are thus the most energy efficient for heating and cooling***.

The edge effect isn't limited to the physical phenomenon**** - the most innovative scientific research happens in interdisciplinary fields (and of course, at the boundary between knowledge and ignorance). Some of the most interesting art and music and literature happens where two different cultures or ideologies meet.

So here's to the fringes. They make the world more exciting and productive!



* 1998-2002. Feels like lifetimes ago!

** For those who want a fuller explanation: The things we use every day (alloys, composites, etc) are made of different combinations of elements and compounds. In metals and alloys, the functional units of the material are crystallites (or grains). A huge fraction of the properties of the material (strength, ductility, conductivity, thermal properties) is attributable to the microstructure, and specificlly the grain boundaries. These discontinuities in the material are high energy sites, and influence the behavior of the material tremendously. Almost all of the thermal and mechanical treatments affect the properties of materials by increasing or decreasing the size, shape, distribution, and energy of the grain boundaries.

Control over the microstructure and boundaries is also very important for controlling the properties of polymers, ceramics, semiconductors and composites.

*** I also remember reading that ancient human dwellings progressed from round to rectangular as prosperity increased, and reverted to round shapes in times of prolonged scarcity. Can't find any references right now. Anyone?

**** Also read the post Some Thoughts on Edge on the Permaculture Reflections blog.

The conventionally preferred farmland is a flat piece of land that has easy access to water and is free of large rocks and boulders. Any variations in a landscape are often removed at great expense to reach this ideal. This is of course due to our preference for using animals and machines for doing the work, and growing single crops over large areas.

In fact, the variations in a landscape are a great asset for creating a rich, productive environment.

In a natural landscape, the variations and gradients in topography, orientation, soil structure, and mineral concentration create a variety of niches where different organisms thrive. Combined with natural cycles (seasons, day and night), these gradients give rise to energy and material fluxes through the landscape. These fluxes further specialize the niches, creating the right conditions for a diverse ecosystem. As we know, biodiversity is at the heart of creating a stable, efficient and productive ecosystem.

In permaculture, these gradients, cycles and patterns are observed and utilized for maximizing biodiversity and for situating plants, buildings, and other structures at the appropriate locations.

Water, often the limiting resource in an ecosystem, is a good example. We already saw how swales and ponds are a good tool for rejuvenating a landscape. They are especially important in Asia and Africa, where highly seasonal rainfall and temperature variations often lead to a marked dry season. Swales and ponds built on a natural slope harvest water with only small changes in the landscape, and make the rainwater available more uniformly through the year. By locating them properly, ponds can also reflect light towards plants, improve humidity, and make the local climate more moderate. Furthermore, swales and ponds create more niches in the landscape by introducing a water content gradient - water, water's edge and moisture gradients in the soil. Once you locate the plants according to their water needs, you don't need to waste energy on irrigation.

Similarly, by studying the patterns of wind, sunlight and natural animal movement, a permaculture site can be optimized to make it not only more productive, but also more habitable for humans, plants, and animals. With all these possibilities, why would you want a featureless land for a farm?

One of the major differences in conventional agriculture and natural ecosystems is in the number and complexity of components. Conventional agriculture is a fairly simple and linear system with very few components and pathways. In contrast, natural ecosystems are highly complex with hundreds, if not thousands of active components (microbes, insects, plants, animals) as well as numerous pathways through the system for energy and materials.

The needs of each component in a natural ecosystem are fulfilled by the outputs of multiple components, and in return, each provides multiple useful inputs for others. Furthermore, each need can often be fulfilled through multiple pathways. These needs are not only material requirements like nutrients and water, but also environmental requirements, like the right amount of sunlight, humidity, pest control, pollination and physical support.

This complexity has two direct benefits -

1. Since everything is useful for something else, there is no 'waste' in the system, increasing energy and resource use efficiency.
   
2. Due to multiple pathways for fulfilling each need, removal of a few components does not debilitate the system.

Thus, a complex system with multifunctional components remains stable and productive with only sunlight, water and air as inputs. Conversely, it is precisely because we insist on keeping farms in an unnatural, simplified state that we need vast amounts of energy and labor for growing food in the conventional manner.

In permaculture, such complexity is intentionally designed into the system, creating a "food forest" with as many as 500-600 plant species, a few domesticated animal species, and attracting a large number of beneficial wild insects and birds. With this approach, a permaculture farm can produce an abundance of food practically throughout the year, without any chemical or mechanical inputs, and requiring far less labor than a conventional farm.

We need to shift our point of view significantly to realize how this is possible - we know that managing a farm with five plant species takes work. Managing a farm with fifty productive plant species will probably take even more work. What is perhaps a little un-obvious is that a farm with hundreds of plant species, a number of animal, and numerous insect and bird species can be completely self regulating and self sufficient, provided the components are chosen well to work together with each other and the local climate and landscape:


On a related note, the BBC series 'Natural World' recently showed the documentary A Farm for the Future, produced by wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking:

Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, [Rebecca] sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is.

Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.

If you're in the UK, you can watch this program on the internet. Otherwise, it may be available on your local BBC channel.

In the last three posts, we saw that the major goal of permaculture (as well as natural farming and other sustainable land use practices) is to create a highly efficient and productive ecosystem by utilizing sunlight, land, and rainfall* to the maximum extent possible. The techniques of permaculture, like swales-and-ponds, mulching, or creating a 'layered' food forest, are derived from a few underlying themes.

Once we understand these themes, it is easy to design own low input highly productive systems, even in small urban spaces:

Designing the system with beneficially interdependent components is a major themes underlying permaculture design. This applies not only to interdependence between biological components (plant guilds, plants and bees, or plants and birds), but also to biological and nonbiological components. For example, plants grown on swales reduce erosion of the swale and in return get a dependable source of water.

The other important interdependence, of course, is between the human and natural components of the land. This includes using the waste products of human activities as feed/mulch/compost/manure for the the natural systems, and in return getting a better harvest from the plants and animals.

It is also important to reduce harmful relationships in the ecosystem. This includes increasing the distance between plants that may hurt each other chemically or physically, situating non-biological and biological components to minimize harmful effects of temperature and humidity, etc.


* I should mention maximum utilization of air too! Apart from water, practically all the biomass on the land is the carbon and nitrogen captured from air.

The third critical component in the natural world is sunlight. On conventional farms, orchards and agro-forests, there is usually only one primary plant species, and sometimes a secondary species, in any given area. Furthermore, a significant fraction of the land is directly exposed to sunlight either between plants or between harvesting and the next planting.

Contrast this with a natural forest, where there are multiple species of plants, each growing to a different height, and adapted to thrive in different intensities of sunlight. As a result, the ground in a mature forest is almost completely dark.

Permaculture design aim to replicate this phenomenon as much as possible on a farm, by creating a 'layered' system. The maximum harvesting of sunlight increases the total yield of the land. Considering that plants are the best solar harvesters we have till date, and that they provide a lot of indirect services along with the food or material harvested, it is imperative that we start employing solar intensive permaculture practices everywhere.

Also see:

• This previous post: Re-Solarizing Farming
• A post on another blog about a farm in Goa (India) that is "harvesting sunlight"

One of the major problems facing small and subsistence farmers is the quality of the land. The 'prime' agricultural land - large stretches of level ground with easy access to water - is already in the hands of larger and usually more financially capable farmers. Conversely, the poorest farmers cultivate marginal lands that have lower soil quality, that are often on hill slopes, and have rainfall as the only source of irrigation. Slash and burn agriculture is also often practiced on such marginal land, leading to a whole host of undesirable consequences.

However, most of the productivity of an ecosystem comes from the interactions of it's living components. This is especially true in tropical areas, where the temperature allows things to grow throughout the year. In a permaculture system, everything uses the outputs of something else. Nutrients are naturally integrated and then fully retained in the system. Over time, the inorganic soil serves primarily as a substrate, and all the necessary nutrients are obtained from the naturally composted biological matter on the top.

These beneficial interactions in a complex ecosystem, combined with small earthworks (swales and ponds) can convert any piece of land into a sustainable, productive, and profitable farm. The key is to plan a rich ecosystem that works with the layout of the land, and generates a harvest that satisfies the needs of the occupants.

An added bonus is that permaculture and natural farming practices work best without mechanization and do not require plowing. This is particularly beneficial for small farmers, who often go into debt to borrow farm machinary or even plow animals.

Here is an example of how seemingly barren land can be converted to a productive farm using permaculture principles:

As you can see, the knowledge of bringing barren lands back into production has been available for the past three decades. Unfortunately, the education and implementation has tremendously lagged behind the needs of subsistence farmers everywhere.

With this post, I am starting a series to explore the various aspects of sustainable land use. I still have a lot to learn, but a number of basic principles are becoming clear to me. In this series I plan to discuss the basic aspects of these interrelated concepts. I will discuss the complexities (and corrections!) in future posts.

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The goal of sustainable land management should be to create a habitable system that

• has very low running costs and labor requirements,
• provides for most of the needs of the people dependent on it,
  
• generates a substantial profit.

One of the key resources required for land to be productive is water. In the next few decades, water scarcity is only going to get worse.


Projected water shortage in the year 2050.
Most urban water harvesting schemes (rooftop collection and storage in dedicated reservoirs), though laudable, are expensive in the short term and neither sufficient nor sustainable in the long run.

To fully utilize the rainfall on a piece of land, it is necessary to

1. minimize water runoff
2. increase top soil moisture content and productive surface water
3. replenish deep underground water reservoirs

These water management principles were often utilized successfully to provide water for farming and urban communities. With the advent of modern engineering, we gave up these low cost, small scale techniques in favor of ever deeper bore wells, massive dams and long canals. Especially in the developing world, these mega projects are not only being built primarily for the benefit of large cities and industries, they have also suffered from corruption, social disruptions, massive delays and cost overruns, and most importantly, ineffectiveness.

The false sense of water security of these techniques spurred wasteful water use and indiscriminate water pollution. Conversely, the impending scarcity has brought us to the point where even the availability of water as a free resource is now under serious debate (even 007 himself got involved! ;).

In light of this evidence, probably the most effective (and cost effective) method is to implement water catchment and groundwater replenishment on the small scale. There are many ancient techniques to learn from and improve upon, but one of the simplest and most cost effective method is creating swales (also known as contour bunding).

Swales are simply long and shallow trenches dug on contour in a sloping landscape, with the dug out material piled on the lower end. This creates a barrier and reservoir for the water flowing down the slope. The water pooled in the trench slowly seeps into the ground, and also provides a stable source of water for plants planted on the mound. Especially in regions where rainfall is highly seasonal and/or irregular, swales are a very powerful way of slowing down the water so that it is available more uniformly throughout the year.


Due to their low cost and effectiveness, swales are an excellent way of beginning a permaculture food forest. These simple water features can be complemented by small interconnected ponds that hold water, percolate it slowly to replenish groundwater, and act as more sites for food production. This method also get rid of the false dichotomy of distinguishing between a 'catchment area' and a 'cultivation area', instead utilizing the available land for maximum productivity.

An excellent example of this approach is Sepp Holzer's* forty hectare mountainside farm in Austria that contains many productive ponds, as well as orchards and vegetable areas:


Do you know anyone that has a small farm or unproductive piece of land? Please tell them about this method of bringing the land back to maximum productivity with minimal investment. With the 3 billion new people joining us on the planet in the next forty years, the only way to for everyone to survive peacefully is to bring all the land back to high productivity without any resource depletion or pollution.

*You can also buy a DVD with three films about the various approaches Sepp Holzers has developed on his farm.

I've just created a presentation about sustainable farming. You can view and download the presentation here (.pdf, 4.13 MB). You can also download a version with smaller file size (.pdf, 2.73 MB, sans fancy background!). Let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, corrections, or questions. I'll be happy to share original presentation in .keynote or .ppt format, just drop me a line.

Also see: This presentation [.pdf] created by Himanshu Khatri of Udai, and this presentation [.ppt] created by Erin Runnels for Kansas State University. (Both of these explain Natural Farming techniques, whereas I have explored both Natural Farming and Permaculture.)

In 1988, Masanobu Fukuoka received the Ramon Magsaysay award*. The Magsaysay award website has an informative biography of Fukuoka that is certainly worth reading.
From the award citation:

"When you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really necessary," says FUKUOKA. He does not plow his fields, nor weed them by tillage or herbicides. He does not plant seeds in tidy rows but casts them randomly upon the ground. He uses no machines, no insecticides, and no chemical fertilizers or prepared compost; he strews his rice and barley fields with straw instead.

In FUKUOKA's rice and barley fields, sturdy grains share their habitat with white clover, insects, birds, and small animals. In his orchards, unpruned orange trees rise prolifically above a profusion of grasses, herbs, and vegetables. They all thrive together naturally.

FUKUOKA points out that his "do nothing" farming completely contradicts modern agricultural techniques. Yet his untidy farm yields grain and fruits just as abundantly as high-technology farms, often more so, and a rich mix of hearty vegetables besides. His method offers farmers extra leisure. It requires no expensive inputs. It creates no pollution. Moreover, it is profitable: FUKUOKA's chemical-free produce is highly prized by health-conscious consumers.

*A week ago, I posted abut P. Sainath, also a Magsaysay awardee.

Permaculture is a popular method of sustainable agriculture management. In this method, the agricultural potential of an area is maximized by

• completely utilizing the resources - sun, water, and land
  
• by making small modifications to the landscape
• and introducing a large variety of productive and interdependent plant and animal species to occupy all niches, creating a high biodiversity environment
  

What does such a landscape look like? The short video below shows the established food forest on the Permaculture Research Institute campus*:


Bill Mollison, the founder of the permaculture movement, gives an overview of the set-up sequence of a typical food forest in this blog post:

Thus the phases of abundance in tropical – subtropical systems of from 1-2 acres upwards in wet seasons could be:

• Season 1. Establishment of an abundant richness of species for trial.
• Season 2. An abundant source of propagation material is produced.
• Season 3. Several species are sufficiently numerous to provide an abundance of yield.
• Season 4. Yield is excellent, propagation material “unlimited”, and slower species start to produce. Absolute abundance is achieved.
• Season 5 on. Abundant yield from as many as 30 perennials and the same number of annuals is achieved, and can be made to persist for as long as is needed.

* You can buy the DVD here.

Seed balls are the essence of natural farming.

These marble sized spheres are made easily by mixing together a variety of seeds with soil, compost, and water. Disperse by merely tossing them on ground, seed balls lie dormant in the wild, protecting the seeds within. After sufficient rainfall, when conditions are just right for the seeds to sprout, the soil mixture crumbles, and new plants take root.

Seed balls are an cheap and easy tool on many scales - you could create a new garden painlessly, introduce vegetation on empty plot of land, restore trees in and around your city, or stop the spread of deserts!

Take minimal action, promote mutually beneficial biodiversity, and let nature take its own course. What could be simpler?

Here's a short documentary on making and using seed balls:

In traditional and modern farming, pesticides and herbicides or manual weeding are a given. This is fighting life with death, and in a real world farm, practically the definition of a Sisyphean struggle.

In a conventional farm, the soil is tilled and fertilized, and between the plants and crop rows, left bare! It is only inevitable that whatever seeds that fall on this ground will germinate and grow vigorously. Inevitably, these will be seeds of non-crop plants. Pulling out weeds by the root only creates habitats for more weeds.

Insect infestations are also invited due to the monoculture on most farms - insects proliferate rapidly in the presence of the abundant food supply, and the variety of natural predators is also low due to the artificially non-diverse ecosystem. The use of insecticides kills all insects and spiders, creating an ecological vacuum where insect population explosion down the line in inevitable.

These toxic chemicals inevitably enter the food supply, persisting and accumulating in the human body over time. And of course, the monetary, energy, and labor costs of these chemicals are enormous.

Actively increasing the plant biodiversity on the farm with a large variety and types of plants, including nitrogen fixing ground cover, takes care of both of these problems. With a beneficial cover crop, the weeds are naturally out-competed, and the few that may to take hold serve to increase biodiversity. It is important to remember that weeds occupy completely different ecological niches from crops, and so don't usually compete with them for resources. Due to the diversity of plants and absence of poisonous chemicals, frogs, lizards, spiders, etc. thrive, and naturally control the insect population.

Thus, expensive, harmful, and labor intensive interventions are not necessary for controlling pests, and life can be controlled with life far more easily. In his own words, here is Fukuoka explaining why pesticides and weeding are unnecessary.

For small farmers in developing countries, the high cost of fertilizers and and uncertain price supports in the market result in increasing debt and poverty. Furthermore, chemical fertilizers are one of the most energy intensive inputs to modern agriculture. Extensive and inefficient use of fertilizers creates nutrient runoffs, with disastrous consequences for aquatic ecosystems. Ironically, while these chemicals are pumped into the farm, the natural waste products of a crop are removed and destroyed, taking away the essential nutrients accumulated in the biomass!

However, chemical fertilizers and even prepared compost are completely unnecessary. On a natural farm, a ground cover of white clover or other leguminous plants efficiently fixes nitrogen in the soil. Leguminous nitrogen fixing crops can also be taken concurrently with main grain crops, or once every few seasons. All the plant material except for produce is either left in the field or returned to the field after harvest, to decomposes naturally and return all the essential nutrients to the soil. This is supplemented with manure from chickens, ducks, humans etc, which provides essential nutrients and speeds up the decomposition of the plant matter.

Taking full advantage of natural systems, it is easy to get yields equal to those achievable through artificial fertilizers. Here is Fukuoka in his own words on the ill effects of artificial fertilizers and the natural way of fertilizing soil.

Sowing is one of the most labor, time, and equimpent intensive steps in agriculture, and particularly so for rice due to the transplanting practice. In natural farming, the costs of sowing are almost completely eliminated.

Seeds are sown underground mainly to protect them from birds and other pests. In the case of rice, the high density, submerged germination is meant to prevent weeds from out-competing the rice. However, this requires transplanting the young rice plants manually - an extremely labor and time intensive step.

On a natural farm, the presence of the continuous plant cover and straw holds weeds in check and hides the seeds from pests. For even more protection, seeds can be enclosed in clay pellets (similar to seed balls - more on this later). The seeds or clay pellets are simply broadcast by hand on to the field, resulting in tremendous labor and time savings, and requiring no equipments. Using this system, even rice has been grown successfully, without the need for transplanting.

In traditional and modern farming, the life-cycle of a crop requires many labor and/or energy intensive steps in the field, including tilling, sowing, spreading fertilizers, spraying pesticides, weeding multiple times, and finally harvesting. Labor requirements are even worse for rice due to the transplanting step, which requires many days of backbreaking labor.

In natural farming, all of these steps are virtually eliminated. Let's take a look at how tilling is replaced:

Tilling is done to for loosening the soil, mixing nutrients, and destroying weeds. In fact, tilled soil becomes compacted more easily, nutrients, and the top soil itself, are more likely to runoff in subsequent rains, and weeds get a better start in the newly tilled barren ground. Furthermore, as the organic material in the soil is exposed to air, it oxidizes rapidly, and releases large amounts of carbon dioxide.

In natural farming, since the soil is left completely undisturbed, these problems are avoided. Instead, the soil is loosened, aerated and mixed by worms and other creatures. The roots of crops and the few weeds are left in the ground, which also keep the soil loose, and increases the nutrient content of the soil. A permanent ground cover (usually of white clover), and the straw returned to the field suppresses the weeds, which in any case can not take hold as vigorously as when the soil is disturbed.

Thus, the no-tilling approach in natural farming eliminates the labor, equipment, and time costs of tilling, and continually increases soil fertility, reduces erosion, and holds weeds in check. Here's some more information about the reasoning behind no-till, and the benefits, in Fukuoka's own words.

Natural Farming was developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka between 1945-1975. A trained microbiologist and soil scientist, Fukuoka gave up his research job following increasing doubts about the wisdom of modern scientific method. Returning to the family farm, he set out to develop a minimalist farming system.

In it's final form, Fukuoka's approach consistently achieved yields equal to or better than modern farms by following four simple principles -

1. No Cultivation: The soil is not disturbed at any stage by ploughing or tilling.
2. No Fertilizer: Neither chemical fertilizers nor prepared compost is used.
3. No Weeding: Non-crop plants are not pulled out of the ground.
4. No Pesticides: Insects are controlled by natural predators.
   

On a natural farm, all straw and chaff is returned to the grain fields and allowed to naturally decompose. This returns essential nutrients to the field, continually increasing soil fertility. Without pesticides and herbicides, weeds and soil dwelling organisms loosen and aerate the undisturbed ground and increase its organic content. A variety of predators hold insect infestations in check.

For more information about natural farming, read this 1982 interview with Fukuoka, which also acts as an excellent summary of his book The One-Straw Revolution.


* "Do-Nothing" is the literal translation of 'Wu-wei', the Taoist concept of the acting in the natural manner; of appropriate, unforced action.

A natural farm is:

• a complex, self-regulating, designed ecosystem
• where a large variety of plants, animals, insects, birds and microorganisms are nurtured
  
• with minimal physical intervention
  
• and no chemical inputs
  
• to produce abundant food and other resources for human consumption
• while enriching the local natural resources.

Natural farming requires significantly less labor than traditional low resource agriculture, and none of the chemical fertilizers, pesticides and costly machinery necessary in modern commercial monoculture. Despite the low inputs, the yields of well-managed a natural farm consistently equal or better those of the best modern farms.

Does the high efficiency of natural farming sound like a fantasy? In fact, over the past few decades, natural farming approaches have been independently developed and demonstrated numerous times in many different environments. Fukuoka Farming and Permaculture are the most popular and best systematized.

On this blog, I will explore the small farm and ecosystem crises in the developing world, and how natural farming can provide solutions.

The time to act is now.