Graham Strouts takes critical look at whether the forest gardens championed by many permaculture enthusiasts can produce food in yields significant enough to compete with traditional orchard and farming systems outside of tropical climates.
Kevin Folta explains how a report on pesticides from the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food inadvertently makes the case for modernizing agriculture in the developing world.
Just about every decision made on a farm will send ripple effects throughout the entire system; these decisions will influence the cost/benefit ratio of many future decisions. This complexity makes it difficult to make rapid changes, and is a major reason why many farmers tend to be pretty conservative in their farming decisions. Even if a farmer wants to try something new (a new technology, or a new crop, for example), that option may be precluded by decisions that were made last year, or even many years ago.
Behind many efforts to make agriculture more sustainable is the idea that our farming systems need to be more like nature. in addition to being false, the whole idea of the “balance of nature” is misleading. From it has come the view that ecosystems are a highly complex, integrated system of interactions between species, complexity that is beyond our understanding. The evidence, however, points to different conclusions.
This article from IPES-Food responds to the claims made in a essay by Øystein Heggdal from December, 2016. Through this essay, IPES-Food welcomes the opportunity to demonstrate the wealth of data underpinning IPES-Food’s June 2016 report: ‘From uniformity to diversity: a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems’
Guest author: Maywa Montenegro @MaywaMontenegro Food systems researcher, UC Berkeley This story was previously published by Ensia on 17 June 2015. It was co-published with […]
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