Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Essay - Ripe for Change: Agriculture's Tipping Point
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4119
by Claire Hope Cummings

Now, in the midst of so much unnecessary human and ecological destruction, we 
are facing the necessity of a new start in agriculture. —Wendell Berry

The story of agriculture is usually told as an epic struggle between people 
and nature. Ten thousand years into this narrative, it looks to some as if 
people have the upper hand. After all, food production is keeping up with 
population growth. But others say that this productivity comes at too high a 
cost. Industrial agriculture is laying waste to soil, water, forests, 
wildlife, and the life ways of traditional farming communities.

Conventional and sustainable agriculture have long debated the question: what 
kind of agriculture works best for both people and nature? Then suddenly, as 
in any good drama, while the forces of good and evil are having it out, 
something happens to raise the stakes. Now, lumbering onto center stage comes 
a real monster, global warming, and the conflict shifts from being about how 
we feed ourselves to whether we survive at all.

We find ourselves at a dramatic point in human history. Agriculture, the 
largest industry on Earth, is exhausting the planet’s biological support 
systems. Two billion hectares of soil (more than the area of the United 
States and Canada combined) have been degraded. In India, this damage has cut 
agricultural productivity by almost US$2.4 billion a year. In Africa, 
threequarters of arable land is severely degraded, worsening the hunger 
crisis there. The annual cost of soil erosion worldwide is estimated to be 
more than US$400 billion. Similarly, water quality and availability are in 
peril. The 450 million kilograms of pesticides that U.S. farmers use every 
year have now contaminated almost all of the nation’s streams and rivers, and 
the fish living in them, with chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects.

And yet, as serious as this environmental predicament is, it will be energy 
issues that determine the fate of agriculture. Industrial agriculture uses at 
least 15 percent of all energy consumed in developed countries. So when oil 
production peaks, fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture will face a day of 
reckoning. And that inevitability raises a fundamental question: do we wait 
for some widespread disaster to happen and let panic determine our social 
policy? Or do we begin now to engage in purposeful social change?

Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping point” analysis provides a useful way to examine 
the dynamics of such dramatic social transformations. Tipping points have 
three essential factors, he says. One, lots of little behaviors accumulate 
and begin to push a system toward change. Two, some ideas or issues “infect” 
public awareness and spread like a virus, pulling the system toward even 
greater change. Finally, one significant moment occurs when things “tip.”

It’s easy to recognize the first factor in sustainable agriculture’s tipping 
point in the thousands of initiatives that support local and ecological food 
production. Sales of organic products have been growing by 20 percent per 
year for the last decade. In 2005, U.S. retail sales of organic food and 
beverages amounted to almost $12.8 billion. Organic practices are being 
proven at both large and small scales and more acreage is being planted in 
organic crops. As consumer demand increases,Wal-Mart has begun stocking 
organic food, and chains of mid-size natural grocery stores are expanding. 
There are almost 4,000 U.S. farmers’ markets selling fresh local food. 
Restaurants are putting sustainably raised food and fish on their menus and 
hundreds of schools are serving organic meals. Fair trade and green labeling 
programs are on the rise.

The number of ways to produce and consume sustainable food keeps growing. 
Land grant colleges and new funding initiatives by foundations are 
revitalizing sustainable agriculture programs. Ecologically minded farmers 
and consumers are rejecting corporate technologies like genetically modified 
organisms (GMOs). Instead, they are turning to plants bred with traditional 
methods that are resistant to wind, drought, salt, and disease. They are less 
expensive, they avoid the risks of genetic contamination, and they do not 
require farmers to give up saving seed. Conventional farmers are adopting 
sustainable techniques and finding, for instance, that nature-based pest and 
weed controls are just as effective as toxic pesticides. No-till cultivation 
is proving to prevent soil erosion and has the added climate benefit of 
sequestering carbon.

These impressive technological and market successes are a tribute to the 
pioneers of the ecological farming movement. And there is no reason to 
believe that this innovative spirit can’t come up with even better ideas to 
deal with the enormous challenges ahead. But what will transform this popular 
enthusiasm into real and lasting changes are two other fundamental issues: 
health and trade. These two issues, the second tipping point factors, are 
shifting the public discourse over food and farming and pushing policy 
changes worldwide.

The public is becoming increasingly alarmed by food-related health problems. 
Rising rates of diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and cancer and birth 
defects from pesticides, plus a growing obesity epidemic in children and 
adults, are grabbing headlines and raising health care costs. The U.S. 
Department of Agriculture estimates that healthier diets alone could prevent 
US$71 billion a year in medical expenses.

Trade issues are no less important. The billions spent every year on 
subsidies have created over-production and rock bottom commodity prices for a 
handful of agribusiness companies. When surpluses are sold overseas for less 
than the cost of production, third-world farmers are put out of business. But 
now, as world trade negotiators promise to end these practices, we are 
presented with an unprecedented opportunity to reformulate farm supports. 
Instead of paying for commodity production, these funds can be redirected 
toward soil and water conservation, wildlife preservation, and maintaining 
the culturally and biologically diverse farming systems that lie at the heart 
of sustainable agriculture. The funding needed to transform industrial 
agriculture is available; what’s missing is leadership. This fix will not be 
easy. Entrenched political interests and agribusiness will not willingly 
relinquish their stranglehold on the status quo.

But there may be no choice. The final tipping point factor, the one that will 
result in dramatic and lasting change, is the issue of energy and global 
warming. Renewable energy is already approaching its tipping point. Some 
energy experts argue that renewable energy sources are now ready to begin 
replacing oil and other fossil fuels. Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain 
Institute says that in the next few decades the United States can get 
completely off oil and revitalize its industrial and rural economies through 
efficiencies, green design, and substitutions for fossil fuels. And, 
inevitably, as energy becomes renewable, agriculture becomes sustainable.

Sustainable agriculture, for its part, will also make a significant 
contribution to renewable energy production.Model farms have shown that they 
can produce all the energy required for food production and provide excess 
energy to the grid, using biogas generators, wind, solar, and fuel from farm 
waste. Immediate reductions in fossil fuel use can be achieved with current 
technologies. Sustainably produced crops can provide biodiesel for 
transportation, and cornstarch-based plastics can be used for packaging. But 
just calling something sustainable does not make it so. Growing GMO corn with 
toxic chemicals for use in energyinefficient ethanol is not an acceptable 
alternative. The key to successfully transforming industrial agriculture will 
be the careful establishment and enforcement of standards that ensure 
sustainability.

Obviously, we are not there yet. The public and business are engaging in 
change, though government action is lagging. But what is different, as the 
moment of reckoning approaches, is that we’re ready. Sustainable agriculture 
can provide food self-sufficiency while reducing the economic and 
environmental degradations of industrial agriculture. Just as the end of oil 
does not mean the end of energy, and may instead be the beginning of the age 
of endless energy, the same is true for agriculture. Industrial agriculture 
was all about scarcity. Sustainable agriculture is all about abundance. And 
knowing that, we can ensure that this age-old human drama need not play out 
as tragedy.

Claire Hope Cummings is a lawyer and environmental journalist. She wrote 
about genetically modified organisms and farming in the January/February 2005 
issue of World Watch.