Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

[I've got my own answer to that question at the end. You don't ask to take 
part - that's what losers do.  You ignore the clueless experts and grow your 
own way]

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Making a Place at the Table for Farmers in the Future of Sustainable 
Agriculture
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/09-6
by Katy Mamen  on Friday, July 9, 2010 by Civil Eats

Interest in how our food is grown has been rekindled in recent years, with 
particular focus on sustainable agriculture. But what exactly is sustainable 
agriculture? Recently, everyone from certifiers like the Food Alliance, to 
resource groups like the National Center for Appropriate Technology, to 
producer groups like the California Farm Bureau Federation, to 
multi-stakeholder efforts like the Keystone Alliance for Sustainable 
Agriculture have been clamoring for authority on the matter, framing up 
widely varying definitions and criteria to steer the national dialogue.

Last week, the National Research Council (NRC) upped the ante with the 
publication of Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems for the 21st Century. 
The report will surely be an important milestone on the path toward 
agricultural sustainability. This 570-page tome, an update of the 1989 NRC 
report Alternative Agriculture, set out to investigate the sustainability of 
various agricultural production systems. It aims to distill principles of 
practice that can underlie agricultural production across geographies and 
scales, with a particular focus on applying practices-drawn from the U.S. 
experience-in less developed countries, specifically sub-Saharan Africa. The 
report also illustrates sustainable practices by showcasing a range of case 
study farms, many of them a review of studies conducted for the 1989 report.

The NRC report sidesteps the debate about what sustainable agriculture is by 
arguing that the "pursuit of sustainability is not a matter of defining 
sustainable or unsustainable agriculture, but rather is about assessing 
whether choices of farming practices and systems would lead to a more or less 
sustainable system as measured by the four goals." It argues the "inherently 
subjective" nature of characterizing sustainable agriculture and underscores 
the degree to which different groups emphasize different goals of sustainable 
agricultural systems, which the NRC frames as:

    * Satisfying human food, fiber, and feed requirements, and contributing 
to biofuels needs;
    * Enhancing environmental quality and the resource base;
    * Maintaining the economic viability of agriculture; and
    * Improving the quality of life for farmers, farm workers, and society as 
a whole.

The bottom line conclusion of the study? In order to meet society's long-term 
needs for food, fiber, and fuel, and minimize externalities, "agricultural 
production will have to substantially accelerate progress towards the four 
sustainability goals" outlined above.

The authors stress the need to pursue two approaches simultaneously: 
incremental and transformative change. In other words, we should support 
positive baby steps toward one or more of the goals across all farming types 
and scales, while at the same time striving to re-envision a model farm 
landscape, as well as a policy framework that will facilitate its realization.

Where do farmers fit?

So just what will it take for our production systems to make this shift? The 
NRC strongly emphasizes that scientific knowledge is the necessary foundation 
to progress toward sustainability, stating that "[s]cience generates the 
knowledge needed to predict the likely outcomes of different management 
systems and expands the range of alternatives that can be considered by 
farmers, policy makers, and consumers." Science is undeniably important to 
the development and refinement of sustainability practices and policies. But 
where do farmers fit?

The NRC report makes surprisingly little reference to farmers' knowledge in 
the American context, but it does recommend that the USDA and other research 
support agencies "encourage researchers to include farmer-participatory 
research or farmer-managed trials as a component of their research." But is 
this kind of partnership really about placing farmers' knowledge on a level 
playing field with that of scientists? The stated objective of this farmer 
involvement is to "enhance information exchange and enhance farmers' adoption 
of new practices and approaches," a formulation that emphasizes a flow of 
information from scientists to farmers, not the other way around.

Farmers can not only offer new innovations and advances in farming practices, 
but importantly, an understanding of what approaches have worked and not 
worked over decades and even generations of diligent trial-and-error on a 
given piece of land. Yet many farmers are not inclined or encouraged to 
document their experience in formal academic format that has come to be the 
respected standard for knowledge among decision-makers.

Many analyses, including the bulk of the NRC report, take a literature-based 
approach, which typically (and often inadvertently) ignore or downplay 
farmers' experience and knowledge. One byproduct is that decision-makers in 
our society tend to overlook farmers as experts, and they get subjugated in 
broader decision-making processes. It may be that sustainability cannot be 
achieved until farmers are understood as agricultural experts in their own 
right and broader solutions truly integrate practitioners and their knowledge 
systems.

The NRC report correctly acknowledges that the loss of local agricultural 
knowledge is a key barrier to sustainability in farming systems. True 
sustainability will require a recognition and acceptance of a diversity of 
agricultural knowledge systems.  As core actors in any kind of agriculture, 
farmers must be placed at the center of proposed change models, in coalition 
with representatives from throughout the model supply chains and food systems 
that foster healthy food systems more broadly.

As Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems for the 21st Century indicates, 
different people-agricultural producers included-emphasize different aspects 
of sustainability. True sustainability requires all four goals to be met. It 
is to farmers like the ones profiled in the report, especially those who have 
scored high on all four sustainability goals, that we should look to in order 
to move U.S. farming to greater sustainability. Not only do farmers like 
these offer up valuable practices, but they hold important value systems and 
worldviews that are essential underpinnings for agricultural policy, as well 
as society as a whole.

What would it look like to truly place farmers like these at the center of 
agricultural policy and production systems for the 21st Century? How can we 
build collaborative decision-making models that better integrate farmers and 
communities into policy decision-making?