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> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture. We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the so
by alisson 11y ago
> But urban land is in short supply, expensive, often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture.
We should stop focusing on the plants and focus more on the soil. Better soil = better water retention = less work with irrigation = healthy plants = healthy planet.
> The belief that only small-scale, non-mechanised agriculture without the use of chemicals respects biodiversity, and that tradition is key to the future, is illusory. In reality, small-scale unfertilised farming of annual crops or unregulated grazing in the tropics are major causes of destruction of soils and forests.
The only problem here is the "annual crops or unregulated grazing" because on a diverse agroforestry the trend is the opposite, the soil gets better and better as years goes on. More organic matter falling on the soil = better soil, as long as you don't remove the organic matter you're good to go! The main problem lives here, a lot of people clean the grass and burn it, the soil should never be uncovered, you can cut the grass no problem but leave it there to compost and improve your soil, just like happens in a forest.
> Chemical use is still, for the most part, equated with environmental destruction. This is a false image, one that leads people to turn away from science and technology. We cannot go back to the ill-designed agricultural systems of past centuries with their famines and harvest failures.
Sure, this so called "science and technology" is what made the land "often polluted, and unsuitable for horticulture" in the first place.
Grow food forests, build forest soil! The forest never needs any chemical added by humans, it doesn't have pest problems, why? It's diverse. Diversification guarantees your surviving, when you have only one source of food (or money, or anything) and it dries out you starve, but if you have multiple sources you can not only survive but have more colorful plate too.
Sure it's more laboring to do forest, but we can change our machines to work with forests instead of mono-cultures, that's the way to go, the more mature a forest gets the less human intervention it needs. Here in Brasil I'm seeing a few people starting to develop machines to work with agroforestry, that's the future of food IMHO: forests!
Well, maybe I'm biased, since I found out permaculture and agroforestry I'm in love, couldn't be happier :)
- readams 11y agoWhat is the yield from your agriforest? Will your forests feed 7 billion people? Of course not. It's perfectly fine to desire luxury goods like local or heirloom varieties when you buy your food. But you are trying to propose a model for feeding the world, and using this approach the world would starve.
- tehchromic 11y agoThe point of food forests is to create solid reserves of food at local level, not to replace industrial agriculture - it's a buffer to have food growing near you, and it makes everyone safer. The point of local food production is it is resilient. If you add local composting, greenhouses, local gardens, community gardens, local farms etc, to sustainable practice in industrial ag, then you have a model that can feed everyone with launching us off a cliff when for example the cost of oil begins to rise as supply falls or war hits in some region or other.
- alisson 11y agoI'm just a beginner here, my agroforest yields nothing, I started just a few months ago. Anyway, from what I hear from people more experienced than me is quite the opposite, it yields much more, sure you would get less tomatos per hectare but you would get a lot of other products too. I'm very curious where can I find evidences agroforests couldn't feed the world? Or evidences it yields less then current farming methods? Edit: a good view on the agroforests they're doing here https://vimeo.com/136423275 https://vimeo.com/136423275 it is subtitled, this one is a good example of how a agroforest can recover destructed lands.