Don 39;t Starve Together Agriculture
Leysan Torri
Meanwhile, cacao harvests in West Africa have been so low that the price of cacao jumped a staggering 200 percent within a single year, and, in anticipation of bad harvests in Thailand and India, the sugar price is expected to rise dramatically as well.
What has happened over the past few years is that the baseline(s) started shifting so fast that changes became noticeable to more and more people. These days, you can literally watch wildlife numbers dwindle, although, as optimists unfailingly point out, some animals do seem to thrive: in the ecosystem we inhabit, it is mostly mosquitoes, cockroaches, certain mites and a few other nuisances.3
Bacteria and fungi, although often overlooked, are vital parts of all ecologies and fulfill crucial roles in the food web. In fact, their biomass greatly exceeds that of all animals combined: they form the very basis of all ecosystems. The reason I think about those organisms, ubiquitous but hidden in plain sight, is that they, too, seem to be heavily affected by drastic changes in their communities.
Just like our overall health is directly correlated to the health of our gut microbiome, so do other living beings depend on beneficial microbes to protect them from threats and maintain microecological equilibrium.
The scope of the problem is immense, and nobody really knows what this will mean for our future. Diseases of all sorts might become increasingly common, as diverse communities of beneficial microbes dwindle and are replaced by ferocious, hyper-individualist pathogens scouring an impoverished microbial moonscape.
Ultimately, both the collapse of biodiversity and climate change are aspects of a larger ecological upheaval that, together, create a positive feedback loop. Damaged ecosystems turn from carbon sink to carbon source, and increased climatic chaos makes life ever harder for the countless species whose lives are already hanging by a thread.
For the moment, things might still seem not too bad if we focus only on overall net productivity, but, as anyone embedded in a conventional farming community knows, both chemical inputs (and thus debt) and overall workload (and thus stress) have steadily increased over the past few years. Farmers now have to put in extra work to try to counteract or outbalance the effects of a collapsing biosphere and a rapidly degenerating climate: for instance, if a section of your rice field gets flooded early on in the season for more than a few days, the young rice plants drown and consequently have to be replanted. If a dryer climate and an accompanying decline in soil carbon content necessitate more irrigation, new pumps, pipes and sprinklers have to be purchased and installed, and more energy needs to be used. And if the pollinators of your main fruit crop are in decline, you will have to spend more time manually pollinating durian flowers at night.
Same overall result, but a lot more work.
The only viable first response to the unfolding food crisis will be to radically increase the number of people working in food production. In overdeveloped countries, fewer than two percent of the population are actively engaged in food production. This number will have to go up to at least pre-industrial levels, as soon as possible.
The aforementioned demographic shift towards an older population also needs to be addressed. Few people realize how catastrophic the situation in regards to agriculture is already: the average age of farmers around the world is between 50 and 60 years.17 This means that the majority of farmers will retire in the coming two decades, and (partly due to additional resource and energy constraints) they will need to be replaced rapidly.
Especially younger people18 (including women!) have to return to the land, start restoring ecosystems, and shift as fast as possible to regenerative, ecological methods of food production. Since we cannot rely on our leaders to, well, lead us through this transition, we will somehow have to start it ourselves.
This is not only true for gardening, but for life in general: the most difficult, most challenging, and most uncomfortable reality we have to face is that things are not going to be okay, at least not for a very long time.
Factory farms are extremely vulnerable to power grid failures as well, which will in turn become more frequent as civilizational collapse unfolds. A few hours without ventilation or air conditioning can lead to the deaths of thousands, sometimes millions of animals.
This helps me appreciate a previous piece you wrote on why climate optimists are the real threat. If you think climate change is about to be stopped with a new technology and are hell bent on ignoring bio-diversity collapse, then you will of course not be taking the need to prepare for this seriously.
Fantastic as usual David! As a "fruitarian" I was fascinated to read what you wrote about fruit trees and how dependent they are, more than most other food crops, on a reliable, consistent climate. I've noticed that in recent years in the wild extremes of fruiting (or not) of my plum trees in Oregon. Now I've just got to convince my kids to move on to land and try to become regen farmers at the same time they are working jobs to support themselves and raise their kids. Don't even know where to start on that one . . .
It almost seems paradoxical, but there is no way to sugarcoat it: the longer we work the land on our small, mixed forest orchard, the lower the fruit yields of many mature trees \u2013 at least as a general trend over the years. This is especially true for the main fruit crops of our province, durian and mangosteen. Now, evil tongues might suggest that we just really suck at gardening. Yet our misfortune seems to be part of a broader a trend, neither confined to our own project, nor to the bioregion or climate zone we inhabit.
Last year was, according to farmers in the region, one of the worst years in living memory for both of those crops. The mangosteen harvest was an almost complete failure, and durian yields were reduced drastically year-on-year, despite the year before having already logged as subpar.
Fortunately for us, overall abundance (as in \u201Cnet productivity\u201D) is still slowly increasing in our garden, but just because the new trees we planted in the previous five years slowly begin to bear fruit.1
Last year, that fateful year when global temperatures went off the charts, was difficult for fruit farmers around the world. In the United States, Hudson Valley in New York state lost 90 percent of its stone fruit, while the neighboring state of Connecticut lost between 50 and 75 percent. Georgia, the \u201CPeach state,\u201D lost over 90 percent of its peach crop due to late-spring cold snaps, with some orchards experiencing losses of up to 98 percent. Simultaneously, South Carolina lost 75 percent. In New Hampshire, a cold snap annihilated apple blossoms, leading to failed harvests for many farmers in the area.
A recent article in The Guardian confirms that this is in no way limited to fruit farming: harvests of staple crops in England will decline due to averse winter weather and exceptional rainfall \u2013 some areas experienced the \u201Cwettest 12-month period since records began.\u201D For months, flood waters stood as high as five meters in some places, and even farms that were spared from actual flooding managed to get no more than 25 percent of winter crops planted due to the unusually high rainfall.
And this is just the latest example. Due to extraordinarily heavy rainfall, Irish potato farmers were only able to harvest 40 percent of their crop in time last year, making it the \u201Cworst [harvest] in recent memory.\u201D On the other side of the globe, Argentina lost half of its soybean crop to an \u201Cunprecedented\u201D drought, marking a \u201Cdisastrous year.\u201D In India, severe flooding threatened harvests and led to an export ban on rice that made global headlines \u2013 a move that will exacerbate the unfolding global food crisis, since India accounts for 40 percent of global rice exports.
And the list goes on and on.
Alarmingly, all this seems part of a general tendency. The paper \u2018Beyond fed up: six hard trends that lead to food system breakdown\u2019 by Jem Bendell compiles data from Britain, showing that harvests of major crops have either peaked already or are about to peak in the coming years:
Even more concerning is that it seems like projects that apply ecologically sane, regenerative methods weren\u2019t spared. As a permaculturalist by profession, I am in contact with a handful of similar projects from all over the world \u2013 and what I hear from other countries and continents sounds eerily familiar. Abnormalities abound: erratic and repeated flowering, as if the trees are confused about the timing and need to take several attempts; fruits that fail to develop properly and shrivel before they reach maturity; seeds that germinate within fruits still attached to the plant; produce that drops prematurely as if suddenly rejected by the plant. On top of reduced harvests and failed crops: fungal infections and sudden insect infestations, hinting at larger ecological imbalances.
To the avid reader of this blog, the following shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise. As I have pointed out repeatedly in the past, agriculture started evolving around 12,000 years ago, not because people suddenly figured out how a plant\u2019s life cycle works, but because the global climate settled into a new, stable state \u2013 the Holocene \u2013 that allowed for sedentism and the first experiments with plant cultivation. Before that, an erratic and unpredictable climate made sedentism (and hence farming) a much riskier survival strategy than nomadic foraging.
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