Sustainable Farming

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.

The US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, in an interview with NPR:

Vilsack: You can foresee a future where farmers are paid for reducing our carbon footprint, much in the same way we're currently paying them for conservation. We're concerned about water quality, we're concerned about preserving the soil, and so we're willing to pay people to do things on their land that would be helpful not just to them but to us.

Q: Are you saying you would want maybe someday to pay farmers for doing fertilizer-free farming, or for putting up a windmill that generates electricity in a renewable way, that sort of thing?

Vilsack: Well, there are a whole host of things, but I think it will be tied to the whole notion of offsets .... [there might be a] central distribution system that basically sells these offsets and contracts with the farmers... eventually the farmer gets benefited for doing what is right for the country as a whole and for the globe as a whole, which is to reduce the carbon footprint.

Listen to the entire interview here.

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.