I’ve been actively engaged in sustainable ag for the last 15 years as a farmer/manager of various enterprises ranging from a few acres of organic vegetables to an 80000 acre ranch producing natural beef. In the process I have explored many aspects of sustainability as they relate to farming and have found myself dissatisfied with the results. A few years ago I heard Alan Savory (founder of the Holist Management movement) speak to a conference of organic growers. He opened his speech by stating that organic farming had caused the destruction of more civilizations than all the wars combined. The rest of his speech wasn’t well received at the conference and we all went away feeling a bit disgruntled. That statement stayed with me over the years, niggling at the back of my brain, haunting my thoughts. As I have tried more and more techniques, and studied more and more I’ve come to realize that he was right to a point. I can’t put numbers to the amount of destruction, but you don’t have to look very far back to see that organic style farming has been really destructive.

So, where does a sustainability minded farmer turn?

I’ve looked and looked and haven’t seen much in the way of examples in the human community. But recently I have hit on some ideas I would like to explore. I’ll lay them out in statements with my conclusions. I am starting an experiment based on these conclusions and invite your comments to help me think through this process.

Ideas

In Nature

1. a few laws give rise to great complexity and diversity. The laws of physics define all the movement and interaction of forces in the universe. Physicists hope to reduce the number of laws to one grand theory of everything, and they are making progress on this idea.
2. biologically the same is true. A few laws give rise to all the divers living things we find on our planet.
3. There should be a few laws that give rise to the diverse ways these living things make a living.
4. Breaking these laws (physical, biological, etc) quickly results in the elimination of the law breaker from the gene pool. Breaking the law is not evolutionarily stable.

I started looking for laws that allowed lions to live the way lions live and worms to live as worms. There should be a collection of a few laws that result in both lion behavior and worm behavior. I found a couple (there are probable a few more, but there shouldn’t be many).

1. the population of a given group will grow to the limit of its food supply.
2. the needs of the group (food, water, shelter, energy) must be met within the confines of the group’s home range.

Every creature (animal or plant) lives by these laws. They find different ways to do this, but there are none that don’t except us. We lived by those laws for hundreds of thousands of years, but for the last 10000 or so we have been breaking the second one. Why have we succeeded in breaking the law? We are very good at adapting and tool using. We also found that breaking the law gives us an advantage- namely power. Having an excess of food and the expanded population that comes with it gives those who control the food POWER. That’s why we keep doing it. Unfortunately, no one can get away with breaking natural laws for ever. You can defy the law of gravity by jumping of a cliff and believing you are exempt from the law. If the cliff is high enough you can continue in this belief for a long time, but ultimately you reap the consequences of defying the law. The same is happening to us. We experiment with “sustainable methods of agriculture” but we do it in the same exploitative, overproducing structure we have been using for the last 10000 years. This system can’t help but fail because it breaks the laws of nature. It doesn’t matter how creative we are it will fail.

My thought is we need to find a way of living that doesn’t break the second law. If we can do that then the population problem we have will come under control, and we will survive as a species. The difficulty is that there are no examples of people living this way. So I ask (and I am in the process of trying to find out) “Can we live locally, using only local resources to meet our food, water, and energy needs?” What kind of “agriculture” system would allow us to do that?

My wife and I have just purchased 5 acres with an old barn, some pasture and a 100 year old house. Right now she is working to pay the bills and I am trying to create a place where we can live in a way governed by the natural laws. I’ll let you know how it goes.