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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The future is organic: But it's more than organic!
  • Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:50:32 -0700


The future is organic: But it's more than organic!
by Dr. E. Ann Clark Published Jan 14 2010 by University of Guelph, Archived
Mar 7 2011
http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-03-07/future-organic-its-more-organic

INTRODUCTION
Organic will be the conventional agriculture of the future, not because of
wishful thinking or because it is the right thing to do, or because of some
universal truth revealed from on high.

You don’t need to be a utopian to see the agricultural landscape of the
future dominated by organic practitioners - whether in the city or in the
country - if you stop to ask yourself ...why are we not organic now?

How did we get to where we are now, and not just in farming but in the entire
agri-food system?

How did we evolve an agri-food system so centered on specialization,
consolidation, and globalization? What drove us to an agri-food system that
reportedly consumes 19% of the national energy budget - but only 7 of the 19%
are used on the farm, with the remaining 12% incurred by post-farmgate
transport, processing, packaging, distribution, and meal preparation
(Pimentel, 2006)? Is this all the result of Adam Smith’s invisible hand - an
inevitable and inescapable result of the unfettered free market or other
universal principle in action - or is there more to it?

This paper will present the argument that the future is organic because the
design drivers that have shaped and molded the current agri-food system are
changing, demanding a wholly new, and largely organic, approach to
agriculture. Efforts to make the current model less bad - more sustainable -
are counterproductive because they dilute and deflect the creative energy and
commitment that are urgently needed to craft productive, ecologically sound
systems driven by current solar energy (Pollan, 2008). Although time does not
permit coverage, post-oil design drivers will also necessarily demand not
just organics but novel agri-food systems emphasizing
# local/decentralized food production, and
# seasonal consumption expectations,
# from minimally processed foods.

Evidence will be presented to show that organic is not enough, however.
Ecological soundness[1] will require a de-emphasis on annual cropping coupled
with re-integration of livestock, both to mimic the principles that sustain
Nature and to dramatically reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

AGRICULTURE WAS NOT DESIGNED TO BE SUSTAINABLE
The design of contemporary agriculture did not evolve in a vacuum. McDonough
and Braungart (2002) said that:

“Design is the first sign of intention”.

So what was agriculture designed to do? Agriculture here in the colonies was
designed primarily for one thing - to export vast quantities of
undifferentiated, raw commodities back to the Mother Country. We do the same
thing today, but the recipient is ADM, Cargill, Smithfield and Tyson.
Arguably, agriculture performed other services as well - sustenance, good
place to raise a family, and a way to make a living.

But those seeking to ensure food production in a post-oil future must first
explicitly acknowledge that agriculture was never designed to be sustainable
- not ecologically, not economically, and not socially sustainable, at least
for primary producers. It would be a coincidence of miraculous proportions if
agriculture would be sustainable, simply because it was designed to do things
which are incompatible with sustainability. Thus, efforts to adjust, refine,
or otherwise tweak contemporary agriculture to sustain productivity are
starting from a flawed design.

Agriculture is intrinsically unsustainable for the same reason that it takes
a toothbrush 500 years to break down in a landfill: because it wasn’t
designed not to take 500 years. Likewise, we have the 20,000 square kilometer
- and growing - hypoxic zone at the mouth of the Mississippi (USGS, 2009)
because N and P retention on corn farms was not a design driver.
Export-oriented agriculture is completely incompatible with ecological
soundness, because unlike Nature, nutrients flow linearly away from the farm
and don’t return - whether exported to Waterloo County or to Germany.

The issue is design. The question is whether the current flawed design can be
refined to enable sustained food production in the post-oil era - or not. And
if not, then what to replace it with?

Although the time of onset of the post-oil era is unclear, the time is now
for research, extension, and education to prepare the way for it.

HISTORIC DESIGN DRIVERS
The inter-related drivers which have created today’s model in the organic as
in the conventional agri-food system were: a) cheap energy and b) the
pervasive externalization of costs, neither of which can persist for much
longer.

Cheap Energy?
Without further elaboration, I will take as a given:
# that Hubbert’s Peak is not a bad joke,
# that there are no viable alternatives to oil (Kunstler, 2006; Homer-Dixon,
2009; and Rubin, 2009), and hence, it follows
# that academic curricula can no longer justify an agri-food system that
burns up millions of years of accumulated solar energy to grow, process,
transport, store, package, and sell a few hundred years of food.

Why was cheap oil such a pivotal design driver? Hindsight reveals that cheap
energy was foundational to the transitory, apparent economic competitiveness
of bigness, a premise which in turn, facilitated the specialization,
consolidation, and globalization which dominate our time.

You don’t have a million head on feed in Feedlot Alley near Lethbridge, AB to
feed Lethbridge (pop’n 85, 500). You have a million head on feed because you
fully expect to ship beef and be economically competitive with beef producers
across the continent. You have every reason to expect this because the energy
cost of transport has been tiny relative to the economies of scale you’ve
captured [and because you are not obliged to cover the cost of the massive
pollution and risk to human health that evolves from high density
confinement; see below].

The opportunity to ship and extract profit over geographically large areas
advantages those willing and able to consolidate to mega-scale proportions
for production and processing.

Specialized businesses tailored to producing vast quantities of bulk,
homogenous product necessarily exclude or co-opt smaller scale operators by
driving down prices, narrowing the profit margin, and forcing farmers to ‘get
big or get out’. Thus, the cheap energy that enables bigness is very much the
driver for the specialization/consolidation/globalization trajectory that has
so marked our recent past.

Costs Externalized?
The historical willingness of society to allow or even encourage
externalization of costs to the environment and to society as a whole also
encouraged bigness, as in Feedlot Alley. When the price paid at the store
does not reflect the true costs of production or processing, consumers are
given a false perception of how cheap and easy it is to produce food, fly to
Tahiti, or air condition our homes. And it is not necessarily a
straightforward process to relate adverse externalized costs back to the
original source.

What is an externalized cost? I’ll illustrate with a final exam question in
my Crop Ecology course.

“You are an Illinois corn farmer, sitting at your kitchen table, staring in
disbelief at a letter to you from the Governor of Louisiana. It is a bill for
$253,476.15 as your share of the cost of cleaning up the 20,000 square
kilometer - and growing - hypoxic zone at the mouth of the Mississippi. USGS
studies have conclusively demonstrated the dominant role of N and P runoff
from corn land in the Mississippi watershed in causing this problem. Your
assignment is to frame a polite response, indicating the various strategies
you have implemented to retain nutrients on-farm and avoid paying the bill”

The magnitude of costs externalized by contemporary agriculture is
staggering. Pretty et al. (2000) conservatively estimated that UK agriculture
externalized £208/ha of arable and pasture land, equivalent to 89% of net
farm income. Using the approach of Tegtmeier and Duffy (2004), MacRae et al.
(2009) reported an annual, externalized cost of $145 million from Ontario
agriculture.

The wave of legislation and market-driven challenges to once common
agricultural practices, as promulgated by Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, and
others through such media as King Corn and Food Inc., reflects growing
societal alarm with costs externalized by agriculture. As the proverbial
chickens come home to roost, whether in the form of hypoxic zones (USGS,
2009) or pathogens, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other drug residues
evolving from CAFOs (Orlando et al. 2004; Fremaux et al. 2008; Khan et al.,
2008; Martinez 2009; Mulvey et al. 2009; Schmidt, 2009) or birth defects from
biocide use (Winchester et al., 2009), society is awakening to the full
meaning of ‘externalized costs’.

Consider that:

* if every farmer had had to absorb all of the costs routinely
externalized on farms today, many common practices would be unimaginable
because they would be prohibitively expensive, and
* if farmers were paid for all the downstream benefits society receives
from ecologically sound management, such as clean air and water, robust and
functional biodiversity, and food free of pharmaceuticals, antibiotic
resistant bacteria, and human pathogens, many practices common on organic
farms would be ubiquitous on conventional farms as well.

The point to get from the above is that neither of these interrelated design
drivers will pertain in the future - the near future. Furthermore, the
faltering of these historically all–powerful design drivers frees us of the
need to labor within the debilitating and dehumanizing constraints of today’s
model. When the price of fuel is high, small-scale Ontario organic producers
won’t be fighting an uphill battle to compete economically with
industrial-scale organic exporters in California.

Anticipating the end of cheap oil gives us the freedom, and indeed the
responsibility, to conceive, validate, and refine alternative designs driven
by a new suite of predictable design drivers.

FUTURE DESIGN DRIVERS
So what will drive the design of agriculture in the future? Arguably, the
overriding design driver, from which everything else will follow[2], will be
the displacement of systems dependent on stored fossil fuel with systems
centering on current solar fuel (Pollan, 2008). In simplest terms, living on
current rather than stored solar energy is an absolute prerequisite to
inter-generational equity - enabling our children, and indeed all of the
earth’s children, to be sustained in the future.

Crafting agri-food systems to meet this goal will demand a massive
reconsideration of what we will do, and how we’ll do it. And the time to
rethink such an overhaul is now.

THIS IS WHERE ORGANIC FITS IN
To support the claim that the future is organic, we must first clarify what
is meant by the term organic, and then rationalize why organic is suited to
meeting the demands of farming on current solar energy.

What is Organic?
As defined today, ‘organic’ is just a set of scale-neutral production
practices - a set of rules for ecologically sound and humane food production
and processing.

Compliance with standards derives from annual audits by independent
certifying bodies (CB), costing individual farmers and from hundreds to
thousands of dollars a year. The CB, of which there are currently 6 in ON,
are themselves certified by a Competent Authority - which in Canada is the
CFIA (http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/fssa/orgbio/man/orgbiomane.shtml) .
The newly minted organic standards are far from perfect, and are by no means
followed perfectly on all farms - yet. But unlike other common terms, such as
regenerative, alternative, and sustainable, standards exist by which
different people can look at the same farm and agree that it is or is not in
compliance with the label ‘organic’.

Keep in mind that there is nothing in organic standards that could not and
should not be done on conventional farms. In a review paper, Stockdale and
Watson (2009) noted that the higher biological activity, biodiversity, and
biofertility of soils under organic management derive not from organics, per
se, but from the higher amount and quality of organic matter added to the
soil in organic systems. Anyone can rotate crops, compost manure, and treat
livestock humanely.

Anyone can tailor cultivation equipment to manage weeds. The same equipment
is used, and in the absence of targeted breeding, many of the same crop
varieties and livestock breeds are used.

What sets organic farmers apart, however, is that they actually do these
things not just because they should, but because they must - for both
functional and auditable reasons.

For example, complex crop rotations are not just for show. On an ecologically
sound farm, crop rotation is a tool of production, indeed, the center pivot
of production tools. Crop rotation serves to manage weeds, soil nutrients,
soil and hence plant health, promote water infiltration and storage,
discourage pest proliferation, and build soil. This is not arcane dogma but a
pragmatic form of agriculture designed to capture the ecological benefits
served by biodiversity in Nature.

In sum, organic standards codify ecologically sound production practices,
with mandated practices affirmed through obligatory annual, third party
audits.

Why Will Organic Become Mainstream?
Organic will predominate in the future because:

* Rising energy costs will preclude continued reliance upon
energy-dependent inputs. Synthetic N alone currently accounts for about 40%
of the energy budget of grain crops, encouraging a shift toward biological N
fixation, but also toward less extreme levels of labile N.
* The rising costs of ‘fixing symptoms’ created by ecologically
dysfunctional production systems will demand less intrusive, more
ecologically sound approaches. For example, the weeds promoted by simple crop
rotations will be viewed as a symptom of an unsound system, rather than as a
problem. The solution then is not just to kill the weeds which will just
reappear next year, but to strategically design rotations and other practices
to narrow the weed niche.
* Organic practices are designed to internalize costs of production,
reducing or eliminating the off-farm impacts objectionable to society

To illustrate the concept of internalizing costs, stockless organic
horticultural farmers surveyed by Clark and Maitland (2004) actually marketed
hort crops from a given field just 4 years in 10.

In effect, they sacrificed hort crop income to grow hay, grain, or other
service crops to add or scavenge N, suppress weeds and pests, and improve the
soil. Organic practices are designed to internalize costs which are routinely
externalized by conventional farming. Organic farmers do not ask society to
absorb the cost of antibiotic resistant bacteria entering the food chain
(Martinez, 2009) or endocrine-disruptor impacts on stream organisms (Orlando
et al., 2009) or birth defects deriving from biocide use (Winchester et al.,
2009).

As reviewed by MacRae et al. (2004), EU nations subsidize ecologically sound
management exactly for this reason - to pay farmers for the extra costs
incurred in order to internalize costs of production. Farmers are paid for
societal services beyond the market-driven premium paid by individuals. Thus,
ecologically sound management will be advantaged when input costs become
prohibitive, and when society rejects the costs externalized by contemporary
farming.

What About Organic Yields?
One argument often heard for rejecting organic approaches to food production
is the perception that high yields depend integrally on resource-intensive
inputs. We have become so entrained to the notion that fertilizers and
biocides are essential to high crop yields that many reject even the notion
of high organic yields.

When studied systematically, however, organic yields can be quite comparable
to conventional yields, particularly after the 3-5 year transition interval.
In MD, USDA researchers (Cavigelli et al. 2008) reported 6-year yields in
corn, soy, and wheat under conventional (no-till and chisel plow) and organic
management (2, 3, and 4 (+)-year rotations). Organic corn yield in the
longest rotation was 24% lower than from conventional yield, an effect which
was attributed largely to insufficient N and weed control issues (73 and 23%
of yield reduction, respectively). Organic soy yield was 16% lower than
conventional, but wheat yield did not differ between systems.

After the transition interval, Pimentel et al. (2005) found no difference in
corn yield or in soy yield between conventional and organic systems in a
21-year trial conducted in PA. Similarly, over a 9 year interval in Iowa,
Delate et al. (2008) showed no significant difference in yield for corn, for
soy, or for wheat yields when grown in conventional versus organic systems.

Clearly, organic management is able to provide on-farm N and pest control
comparable to what is purchased off-farm in conventional systems. However, it
must be noted that the longer rotations typical of organic management mean
corn may be grown once in 5 or 7 years, compared to in alternate years in a
typical corn-soy rotation.

Thus, total corn production in 10 years time will be much less in an organic
system.

Can Organic Feed the World?
Is this the right question to ask, given

* the dependence of conventional farming on inputs derived from
diminishing and increasingly costly supplies of fossil fuels,
* the depletion of nonrenewable reserves, such as P (Cordell et al.
2009), and
* the adverse priming effect of synthetic N on breakdown of soil organic
matter (Mulvaney et al. 2009) and on nitrous oxide emissions (various, in
Clark, 2009)?

In other words, are current conventional yields an appropriate standard
against which to compare organic yields, given that such yields will not be
remotely sustainable in the post-oil era?

Furthermore, organic and low-input yields reportedly already surpass
conventional yields in the Third World (Badgley et al. 2007). According to
the UNEP-UNCTAD (2008), the issue in the third world is not ‘how to feed
people’, but rather, ‘how to end poverty and hunger’. Organic farming is
viewed there as an enabling or empowering vehicle for social change and
development, not just a way of producing food. How you frame the question
predetermines the range of possible answers. The answers to ‘how to end
poverty and hunger’ are quite different from ‘how to feed the world’.

WHAT ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY?
It is argued by some that organic is conceptually narrowing; too limited to
justify an academic curriculum, and that a broader focus on sustainability is
enough. The problems with sustainability are several:
# In the much-cited Brundtland Report, “sustainable development is
development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs” - which means exactly
what? Except in the broadest sense, how do these words inform and give
direction to curriculum to actually prepare people for a post-oil future?
# Chuck Francis of Nebraska says that sustainability is ‘too good a word’,
having been co-opted and used by anybody and everybody, to mean whatever they
want it to mean. Without an accepted definition, it is a word without
meaning. On what basis can one decide if growing corn for ethanol or adopting
conservation tillage or precision agriculture is, in fact, genuinely
sustainable? Or even less bad? Sustainability, arguably, is a ‘feel good’
word. However, because it means whatever you want it to mean, it does not
lend itself to constructive engagement when such action requires a population
of people to accept fundamental change. Academically, it lets us look like we
are ‘doing something’ constructive, when in fact, we are just spinning our
wheels.
# From a comparative perspective, pretty well every school has courses or
programs dealing in some way with sustainability, often from a social
perspective. Guelph’s unique advantage, as an agricultural school, is it’s
capacity to create, examine, and validate the biophysical soundness of
agri-food systems. Defaulting to a program on sustainability would obscure
this unique advantage in functional expertise, and ultimately, in Guelph’s
relevance to future agriculture.
# Bill McDonough, award-winning architect and designer
(http://www.mcdonough.com/) views sustainability as a flat, stagnant, and
uninspiring call to action, using the analogy of:

Q - “So, how’s your marriage?”; A - “Well, it’s sustainable”. McDonough says
that we need to vision, dream, and aspire to more than just incremental
modifications that let the current system be ‘less bad’. He states:

“What if humans designed products and systems that celebrate an abundance
of human creativity, culture, and productivity....so intelligent and safe
(that) our species leaves an ecological footprint to delight in, not lament?”

What indeed? As applied to date, research and education on agricultural
sustainability have tended to focus on making the existing system less bad.
For example, the harms of biocides are increasingly recognized, encouraging
efforts to reduce their use through scouting to monitor pest levels and
establish thresholds for applying biocides. This is supposed to enhance
sustainability.

But recall that agriculture was never designed to be sustainable. To
illustrate the flaw in this logic, note that McDonough and Braungart (2002)
have no use for recycled paper, which they call ‘slow motion waste’. Paper
was never designed to be recycled, such that efforts to do so consume large
amounts of water, chlorine and other chemicals, leave large amounts of toxic
sludge, and never recover the original fiber quality - a cradle to grave
approach. So their book, Cradle to Cradle, is made of plastic made to look
like paper. It is designed so that when the lifespan of the book is finished,
the ink can be lifted off into the ink pot, the plastic goes back to the
plastic pot, and a new book can be recycled without waste. No waste. Not less
waste. No waste.

Who are these guys? Seem farfetched? Implausibly futuristic? Then
recognize that their company is hired by the likes of John Deere, Ford Motor
Company, Nike, and Wal-Mart to design buildings, complexes, and systems.
Their focus is on design, and their way-out-of-the-box methods work.

Is making an inherently flawed system less bad - analogous to tweaking the
process of recycling paper - the best that Guelph, the top agricultural
school in the country, can come up with - or do we welcome the opportunity to
dedicate ourselves to exploring entirely novel approaches? In other words,
and with thanks to an anonymous author, when you find that you are riding a
dead horse, do you buy a stronger whip, appoint a committee to study the
horse, or announce a new funding program for dead horse performance? Or do
you just get a new horse?

ORGANIC IS NOT ENOUGH FOR POST-OIL AGRICULTURE
So what would ecologically sound, post-oil agriculture look like? Organic?
For sure. Of necessity. But organic according to contemporary North American
organic standards is not enough. Humans have a long history of farming
themselves to extinction, and long before GMOs or biocides or synthetic
fertilizer were invented. So the issue of resolving the problem of
ecologically unsound farming is more than replacing these inputs with
rotations and composting. Organic standards do indeed help us to avoid many
of the needless harms we’ve imposed upon ourselves in recent decades. But as
much as it pains me to say it, as practiced today, some (most) organic farms
are still ecologically unsound.

Why? Several issues can be mentioned, not least the one-way nutrient movement
embodied by export-oriented agriculture, but in the interests of time, we’ll
consider one. I would suggest that the over-reliance on large-seeded annuals
in agriculture is the root cause of the unsustainability of agriculture,
historically and today.

What’s Wrong with Large-seeded Annuals?!
If we accept:

* that Nature is the only true and certain model of ecological soundness
* that the type of vegetation adapted to much of North America is
perennial - trees and grasses
* that agriculture is an inherently unnatural system, and
* that to approach ecological soundness, agriculture must emulate the
principles that sustain Nature; and further,

then I put it to you that ecologically sound agriculture - including organic
agriculture - will necessarily rely less on annuals and more on
perennials[3]- with a central role for grass-fed livestock[4]. And let me
re-affirm that this does not mean less vegetables, as these account for
barely 2%[5] of arable land in ON. The problem is the predominance of
large-seeded annual grains, which currently occupy over half of the arable
land in ON, grown largely although not solely for livestock feed to enable
the confinement industry.

Most of global nutrition today comes from barely a dozen crops, with
large-seeded annuals like corn, rice, and wheat accounting for the lion’s
share. So what?
# Annuals introduce periodicity into nutrient sinkness, leaving gaps early
and late in the year that coincide with times when precipitation exceeds
evapotranspiration and the net direction of water movement is downwards.
Perennials more effectively cover off these leaky intervals with active
nutrient sinkness earlier and later in the year
# Annuals require bare soil. Nature has evolved strategies, such as the soil
seedbank, seed rain, and laterally encroaching vegetation to keep the ground
covered. Keeping soil bare, apart from the sown crop, means perpetual war
with Nature, whether through tillage or herbicides. A perennial grass sward,
however, behaves a lot like Nature, keeping the ground covered yeararound,
and with an economically valuable crop.
# Annuals are almost always sown in monocrops, impoverishing the plant
biodiversity so vital to many of the functions that sustain natural
ecosystems, including controlling pestiferous populations. Perennial grass
swards, in contrast, quickly become biodiverse even if sown to just a few
species, and are thus better able to sustain ecosystem functions.
# Annually re-setting a field back to the pioneer stage loses the
accumulating advantages of succession, which include building soil organic
matter and nutrients, with follow-on benefits in water conservation, risk
management, and disease/pest control. Again, perennials intrinsically capture
these advantages, which is why withholding land from cultivation under a
perennial grass sward actually builds and regenerates soil damaged by annual
cropping
# Modern agriculture linearizes nutrient flow, extracting nutrients to
deficit in one place and concentrating them to excess in another, generating
both scarcity and excess. Real sustainability demands nutrient return -
popularized as Howard’s ‘Law of Return’. Exporting an acre of land as meat,
milk, or eggs means a fraction of the implied nutrient export of grain or
vegetable crops.

The large-seeded annual growth habit is adaptive primarily in Mediterranean
climates which are characterized by protracted summer drought. Allowing
annuals to become so prominent in North America, where a perennial growth
habit is adaptive, necessarily exposes ecological disjuncts or
incompatibilities.

I put it to you, then, that whether fruit and nut trees or grass swards,
perennials will have to account for a much larger share of the agricultural
landscape if our goal is ecologically sound agriculture.

And be very clear that this reasoning pertains whether it is barley or
soybean, conventionally or organically grown, and arguably, independent of
tillage practices.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, conservation-tillage practices are
demonstrably effective in sequestering carbon and improving soil organic
matter only in some agro-climatic regions (Gregorich et al., 2005). Using
conservation-till practices in order to prolong annual cropping is at best a
weak proxy for the robust benefits - both to the farm and to the global issue
of GHG abatement (Clark, 2009) - of withholding land from cultivation under a
perennial sward.

Designing for the post-oil future means tailoring agricultural crops,
practices, and expectations to the soil, climatic, and managerial constraints
of each region. And for much of North America, that means a whole lot less
annual - and especially grain - cropping. In other words, tailor the
agriculture to fit the environment, rather than trying to shoehorn-in annual
crops to an environment suited to perennials.

But What about All That Grass?
Perhaps we can agree that ecological soundness depends on emulating the
principles that sustain Nature, the only true and certain model of
sustainability, and for much of North America, the native vegetation is
perennial - not annual. But humans don’t do well on grass or bark. This is
where livestock come in, as a bridge to convert perennial grass swards -
which are essential for ecological sustainability - into human-usable
products.

Livestock provide the economic justification for ‘doing the right thing’ by
the planet - and for human sustenance.

To illustrate the concept of livestock as a bridge, I once saw a pile of
termite nests near a dwelling deep in the rainforest of Nicaragua. The home
had screenless window openings, and was in an area infested by night-flying
mosquitoes carrying not just malaria but dengue fever. Each night, one of the
termite nests - which look like a large rugby ball - was placed upwind of the
house, set on fire, and allowed to smolder and smoke for hours to discourage
downwind mosquitoes. The resident hen, chicks in tow, capitalized on the free
lunch by scratching continuously at the termite nest, teaching the chicks to
gobble up the termites as they tumbled out of their smouldering home. In
effect, the chicken filled a missing link in the transformative chain of
nutrition that started with a wholly inedible product - decaying wood -
passed through the termites and chickens, and culminated in eggs and
ultimately meat for the farm family.

But does this reasoning mean replacing all those annual vegetables we like
and need with even more meat, milk, and eggs than we already eat? No. The
grass ley system formalized by Stapledon and Davies (1948) facilitates the
production of needed annuals by rotating annuals for direct human use with
perennials to be grazed or conserved for livestock. In this system, an
interval of 1 to several years under perennial sod is rotated with an
interval of 1 to several years of annual crops, to produce what we need while
at the same time, meeting the needs of Nature.

Is there enough land to support grassland ley farming in ON? Because over
half of all arable land in Ontario grows grain for livestock, a return to
traditional mixed farming simply means switching to a more grass-based ration
for whatever livestock can be justified on the post-oil landscape.

Some have argued that we should stop growing livestock entirely, or at a
minimum, eat less meat. While eating less meat is hard to argue with, I would
argue that livestock - because of the forages they consume - are in fact a
critical foundation to ecological sustainability. But I refer not to
livestock in confinement, but rather, to livestock as service providers.

The exclusion of livestock from many farms, including many organic farms,
challenges ecological rationality - exceeds the forgiveness limits of Nature.
Yet many contemporary organic farms are nonetheless pursuing unsustainability
by choosing to be stockless. Organic standards have been interpreted to
permit the same commodification and polarization of crop and livestock
farming which have proven to be so problematic on conventional farms. Yet
mixed crop:livestock agriculture was the norm not even 100 years ago. As
argued by no less an authority than Sir Albert Howard (1943), one of the
founders of what has become organic farming:

“Mother Earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always
raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and prevent
erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus;
there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance
one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of
fertility....”,

Livestock perform many services for us. Livestock are more than a source of
meat, milk, and eggs. We need to take a step back and see the bigger picture,
employing livestock to reconcile the divergent demands of ecological
soundness with the needs of human nutrition.

GUELPH’S UNIQUE ROLE
Gomiero et al. (2008) noted that universities have done little, in research
or in education, to build the population of skilled organic farmers needed
for the future. Based on sustained trends, MacRae et al. (2009) estimated
that the number of organic farmers in ON will need to increase more than
10-fold over the next 15 years, just to keep up with projected demand for
organic food. As the premier agricultural school in Ontario, and arguably, in
Canada, Guelph has a unique responsibility to contribute to redesigning the
agri-food system. Guelph’s pioneering B.Sc.(Agr) Organic Agriculture major is
explicitly designed to to prepare people - philosophically and functionally -
for fundamental changes to how we will live and farm in the soon-to-be
post-oil future.

CONCLUSIONS
1. The future, which is coming faster than most of us appreciate, will be
organic.
2. Agriculture, as much of modern society, evolves in response to forces or
drivers. Arguably, the dominant drivers in our recent past were cheap oil and
the willingness of society to tolerate costs externalized by seemingly
efficient mega-scale production and processing.
3. Drivers change, and the system they drive necessarily also changes.
Post-oil realities will advantage small-scale, organic, locally-sourced,
seasonal, and minimally processed food, just as cheap oil selected for
bigness, resource-based production, globalization, and
processing/packaging/refrigeration.
4. For much of North America, agriculture - including organic agriculture -
is not ecologically sustainable, in part due to the absence of perennial
forages, and hence, livestock to convert the forage into human-consumable
food.
5. The sooner that academics and government policymakers acknowledge the
implications of post-oil for the structure and function of agriculture - and
education in agriculture - the easier it will be to design and educate for
the future.

FOOTNOTES:
1. As a concept, ‘sustainability’ rests on economic and social 1 as well as
ecological ‘legs’. For the present talk, however, the focus will be on
ecological soundness.
2. Everything else will include the design of cities, for example. What is 2
the upper limit of population for a city that feeds itself on current solar
energy? A million? A hundred thousand?
3. plants that live 3 or more years, including 3 most fruits and nut-bearing
trees,
4. horses, cattle, sheep, and goats evolved to consume grass and some woody
species; pigs can consume diets largely or wholly made of grass, while grass
can be part of a diet for chickens and turkeys
5. And fruit, which occupy 1% of arable land in ON, are biennial or perennial
already

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Editorial Notes

E. Ann Clark, Plant Agriculture, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON
(eaclark@uoguelph.ca) Presented to the Annual Guelph Organic Seminar Series.
14 January 2010, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON

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