AGRICULTURAL METABOLISM
We share, with many others, a view that agriculture has been blighted by declining overall economic viability of current energy use, and much agricultural development policy, and have highlighted some concerns over the environmental unsustainability of current production levels and their related inputs to essentially natural systems.
This ‘conventional’ farming industry has also been shown to be quite unconventional in its extensive use of ‘alien’ elements previously uninvolved in farming systems. These can be seen as the incorporation of scientific (largely chemical) conceptions of the farming process, at the expense of supposedly less flexible ‘old knowledge’, as well as the inclusion into farm systems of prescriptions offered by such a scientific approach, which can be seen to have fundamentally influenced the functioning of almost all of the agro-ecosystems into which they have been introduced.
Such a ‘rational’ approach to the complexities of sustainable agricultural production has ignored, or externalised, so many of its costs that social and economic appraisal of agriculture now takes place from a level, which at no point seem to fully appreciate the importance of an individuals interaction with the resource base.
Economic analysis has assumed a need for external inputs because it is not familiar with agricultures complex biological potential, conceptualising instead , a linear flow of inputs (costs) and outputs (product).
The more recent trend towards a heavy social science involvement in agricultural policy and planning has tended to concentrate on maintaining rural communities incomes in relation to other sectors, through structural adjustments to relief entitlement, as opposed to encouraging efficient husbandry methods. The subsequent, some might say implicit, loss of which can be seen as a major contribution to the need for structural adjustment in the first place, through an underestimation of both the true costs of many modern innovations, and the potential stability (economically and ecologically) of joint economies which maintain and enhance the regenerative, therefore long term productive, capacity of the resource base.
In summary, the upper limits of output from a farming system based on organic nutrient availability are potentially vast and largely un-explored, whereas the diminishing productivity of artificial inputs is well documented.
Many years ago, when working on strategic agricultural policy development we looked at finding an effective conceptual model for a more sustainable approach. It was not a ‘new’ system, and we were not seeking to reinvent the wheel. We were simply trying to find a graphic and useable managemnent tool to help farm systems appeciate the interconnectedness of the sites on which they wre based without becoming embroiled in complex applied biology.
The ability of closed biological cycles to achieve excess fertility through the action of bacterially processed manures, and therefore the physical stability of the resource base along with those things dependant upon it – such as livestock, and including the farm family, is well proven, but reliant for success upon tremendous and intimate knowledge of a specific location over a period of time, as this is what determines the effectiveness of management and thus influences yield, soil health and overall productivity.
The result was ‘agriculural metabolism’
In an attempt to address these issues we now put forward the suggestion that a shift in emphasis is needed, in economic conceptualisations and analysis, and research and design priorities. This involves not only focusing on the role of the farmer and the techniques employed by farmers, but also to emphasise the necessity to prioritise a focus on the resource base.
The tendency to focus on the crop, has lead to the situation described previously, in which the resource base is not seen as the final economic constraint. As such it is used more like a replaceable commodity rather than irreplaceable capital – from which commodities can be extracted in the form of by-products, whilst an on-going improvement of the quality of the resource base is achieved through effective nutrient cycling.
The indirect character of such an approach shows a more realistic reflection of the processes at work in all forms of crop production, where direct linkages are seldom in evidence. Increases, whether quantative (eg yield) or qualitative (eg crop health) in such a system can therefore be seen to emanate from actions that are a result of a better understanding of the farm environment and the interaction of its components.
This is gained through experiential farmer learning, which we argue is the key, not only to on-farm decision making processes, but also to greater understanding and co-operation between those involved professionally with agriculture (eg researchers, extensionists, policy makers) and farmers. If such an appraoch is employed then research stations would realistically resemble, not only physically but also managerially, the farms to which their work is extended. This is the fundamental aim of the Quiet Waters project.
As such it is subject to similar risks, pressures and responsibilities, from which all involved could not fail to learn.
If then the farm can be seen to represent a catchment area for solar radiation, and a site for subsequent biological flows and cycles, which are the responsibility of the farmer to organise into useful production, then all attempts to improve such organisation must be essentially powered by manipulation of these flows and cycles to achieve the favoured rate of nutrient transfer to satisfy cropping demands.
To do this as farmers we must establish an efficient system of land use (as opposed to concentrating on just farming a limited number of crops). This system of husbandry must ensure that the needs, caused by human disturbance to the intensity of natural cycles, are met before net output can be realised.
This avoids the pitfalls of modern cropping techniques, in which it becomes impossible to leave enough fertility within the resource base itself, thus leading to attempts to quantify losses for replacement (in terms of straight NPK), which at best can be seen as a crude attempt to sustain crop production levels in spite of the implicit degradation of the land.
Instead, what is required is growth energy to remain metabolisable, or accessible to the natural processes at work on the land. This is in the form of crop residues and a proportion of the useable crop yield itself, which is turned into a returnable form, through animal feeds which become faeces and urea, which can then activate and stimulate other organic wastes it comes into contact with, ie, bedding and other compost ingredients, before eventual return to the land in a “root-preferred” form.
The annual growth that is an inevitable result of such nutrient cycling techniques can then add variety to the forms of “affordable” net output.
All activities, trials and experiments on the holding, which co-operate with these broad principles, can be seen to have fulfilled certain criteria in terms of the fertility balance of the crop site and a contribution to the overall biological stability of the agro-ecosystem.
Then, the focus of attention for specific innovations can be centred around efficient integration of the techniques in terms of market potential, labour requirements, cost savings and other aspects which help validate or reject techniques, allowing some of them to be integrated fully into the longer term farming system. In this way the whole ‘system’ is constantly evolving in terms of its composition, efficiency and output in the light of its own findings. The cohesion of the elements within the farm situation is thus reliant on experienced management and manipulation of all potential joint economies, within a healthy natural environment – which itself remains the favoured quality control for produce on the part of the consumer.
The net product of the holding can then be defined as the total goods sold off the farm after, an adequate proportion of gross production has been has been reinvested into the holding – in its organic form. The increasing biological activity under such a system can thus achieve gains in net product without increasing pressure on productive capacity, as any such gains are a result of an intensifying of this productive capacity itself.
The implication of this type of growth in productivity is that it is achieved at a diminishing cost, as the proportion of “surplus” increases relative to the improved regenerative capacity of the holding. That is, the more stable the basis of production becomes biologically, through continued additions to latent fertility, the more “affordable” to the system output becomes.