The problem with agriculture

Agriculture has obviously played a huge role in the development of the human enterprise. Without agriculture, we wouldn't be able to live in cities and sustain the number of people alive today. So from a technological perspective, it is a very successful invention. Unfortunately, this achievement comes at a price. Farming requires a lot of land, leading to deforestation, loss of top soil and a decline in biodiversity. It also uses a lot of water and large amounts of energy for production, processing and transportation.

These problems are not new. Previous civilizations all had to deal with them in some way, and many of them collapsed because they couldn't. Deforestation often played a major role.

Problems of deforestation arose for many past societies, among which Highland New Guinea, Japan, Tikopia, and Tonga developed successful forest management and continued to prosper, while Easter Island, Mangareva, and Norse Greenland failed to develop successful forest management and collapsed as a result.

The problems we're experiencing with agriculture today are an order of a magnitude more severe, largely because of two drivers that didn't exist before: a dwindling energy source that can't be replaced, and running into planetary boundaries.

Finite energy

Modern agriculture relies heavily on an extremely powerful, but finite energy source: fossil energy. Fossil fuels are not just used for powering the tractors and trucks, but also to produce various chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides. Their combined pollution also happens to degrade soils, contaminate waters, kill off insect populations and heat up the atmosphere, causing a major climate crisis and threatening the existence of all life on Earth.

But even without those side effects, we'd still have the problem that fossil fuels will run out one day. Oil production has already peaked and an energy decline looms on the horizon. And despite decades of research into alternative energy sources, it doesn't look like they will be able to replace fossil energy any time soon. In fact, they won't even come close. And developing these alternatives actually requires massive amounts of fossil energy, aggravating the problem it is supposed to address. Long story short: we have to kick the addiction and learn how to live with a whole lot LESS.

LESS energy
LESS stuff
LESS stimulation

Planetary boundaries

Modern industrial agriculture is essentially another form of strip mining, taking from the soil without giving back. Soil erosion and deforestation are already causing major problems, and at the current rate of decline, we may have as little as 60 years of top soil left. By now, humanity has directly altered 75% of Earth's ice-free surface and we show no signs of stopping, with old growth forests still being cut and burned down all over the world. Since 1900, modern humans have cleared one third of the world's forests (an area the size of China). The same as what has been cleared over the previous 9000 years. In many cases, to make way for agriculture.

That's insane already, but it gets even crazier if you look at what we're doing with all that farmland. We feed almost two-thirds of all the crops we grow to domesticated livestock, who of course need a lot of space too. Together with our animals, we now make up around 96% of all vertebrate biomass. No, that's not a typing error. That means 96% of the weight of all mammals now consists of humans, cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, goats, dogs, cats and hamsters. A mere 4% is left for all remaining wildlife - the elephants, giraffes, rhinos, bisons, bears, lions, whales, dolphins, wolves, deers, foxes, ferrets and so on - with whom we share this planet. 4%.

So we'll be out of fuel and top soil soon, we're destroying entire ecosystems (Earths life support systems) and we're replacing them with hamburgers. It doesn't get more unsustainable than this. There is no place in the future for what we call agriculture today.

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

Culture without agri

I sometimes wonder: modern humans exist for approximately 300.000 years, but we only started farming around 10.000 years ago. That's a whopping 290.000 years without agriculture. Surely, we must have done a few things right during that time? Can we somehow reintroduce some of these things into our future lives?

That's very hard to tell of course. We often call our earlier ancestors hunter gatherers. After discovering how to wield fire (the secret is to bang the rocks together guys), we started to bring the food we found in nature "home", where we cooked it. This gave us a big energy boost and probably also fueled our social and cooperative behaviour. We went on to develop advanced toolmaking techniques, and language, which gave us the ability to pass on our knowledge to next generations. Human culture was born. From what little we know, it looks like this way of life was still rather sustainable. It must have been, if it were to last for that long. We depended directly on the ecosystems we inhabited, knowing very well that disturbing the balance meant certain death. We had no "dominion over the Earth"; we were living as part of Nature. This is reflected in most of the remaining indigenous cultures. Although they each have different customs and beliefs, they often share a common understanding of: take only what you need and share whatever surplus you have. A very reciprocal way of relating to each other, and to Nature.

The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

What tempted us then, to pick up that hoe and start farming? I leave that for another day, but a very compelling narrative can be found in the book Ishmael.

On an interesting sidenote: the size of the human brain has always been growing, up until... Around 10.000 years ago. Hard to say if there's any correlation with agriculture (and didn't we invent beer around the same time?), but a curious coincidence nonetheless.

What matters today is that going back to our hunter gathering way of life, with now over 8 billion people, seems fairly impossible. We've taken over the planet and there's not nearly enough nature left to hunt and gather in. That party is over. Please go home, the bisons are gone.

But there is increasing historic evidence that suggests some of our ancestors were already living together in organized societies, even before agriculture. And some of these societies have been found to influence their surrounding forests in order to become more suitable for growing desirable species. Researchers refer to pre-colonial societies in the Amazon, who used the resources of the forest sustainably over many centuries, as "a positive force in maintaining forest integrity and biodiversity."

They were stewards of the forests.

From farm to forest

With this in mind, let's try to image our future for a moment:

In this future, the farm is no longer the center of food production. That place has been reclaimed by the forest, which we have helped (re)grow, and are now managing communally and sustainably. Instead of primarily focusing on growing a specific crop on a fenced piece of land, the emphasis has moved towards creating and supporting balanced ecosystems, from which food and other resources emerge much more naturally. By tearing down those fences, we were able to reconnect with our food system again, recognizing that our own health is directly connected to the health of the ecosystem as a whole.

To make that future a reality (easier said than done), we need to zoom out from our agricultural perspective (land = resource) and start observing things from an ecological point of view (land = life). Once we do that, we soon discover that food is just another term for energy. And that in nature, one organisms waste is another's feast. In order for any ecosystem to sustain itself, it must have a balanced energy flow. We need to surround ourselves with forests that sustain us, and which we help sustain. We need food forests.

Through this website, I hope to collect examples of forests that are already growing, here in the Philippines. Let them inspire us, and feed our imagination, so we can all start living towards that future.