Revitalising Agriculture
By Kim Deans
I remember a time around 10 years ago when I became disillusioned working in agriculture. After following my calling towards a career in agriculture from a young age I reached a point where I had lost interest in working in industrial agriculture. I had not been drawn to a career in agriculture to breathe in the fumes of agrichemicals, or to contribute to degrading our Earth’s precious resources in exchange for money. Watching the life force drain out of the rural communities and the landscapes around me has fuelled my curiosity about how we can bring a new vision of agriculture to life.
This curiosity led me to become more interested in people than production. More interested in food than commodities. Interested in taking account of the health of soil, land & people alongside the health of the business. More interested in asking great questions than having all the answers. More interested in quality than quantity. More interested in true* profit than maximising yield. Concepts that are at odds with how industrial agriculture systems have operated.
My disillusionment had me considering a change in career path when I remembered that soil health is the absolute foundation of human and planetary health. Everything comes back to soil health! Agriculture was both the problem and the solution. This awareness revitalised my enthusiasm for agriculture and for learning, applying, and sharing what I can to contribute to reinventing agriculture by bringing soils, landscapes, and people back to life.
Revitalising is to give new life, energy, activity, or success to something. Vitality is something we experience with all our senses. We can see when a plant, animal or human is glowing with energy and vitality. We hear the insects, birds, and animals in our landscapes. We feel energised being around plants, animals and people who are brimming with life, and drained when in environments devoid of life. Food grown in soils full of life tastes and smells amazing. It’s so obvious when vitality is there, yet when life force gradually drains away it can happen without us noticing it.
Shifting baseline syndrome is where the natural environment gradually declines in condition and the accepted norms shift along with it. Each generation does not realise or have a memory of what has disappeared or degraded before their time. Accepted environmental conditions continually get lower as these baselines shift. The vitality of agriculture has been gradually draining away over time and monocultural agricultural landscapes where there are herbicide fallows, no trees and no biodiversity have now become accepted as the new normal. An example of a shifting baseline I have observed is how it’s become accepted as “normal” to apply several fungicide applications each growing season to cereal crops, while 25 years ago fungicides were only required occasionally.
Vitality is not something we can reduce to a single measurement because aliveness emerges from within complex ecosystems based on relationships and communication. Vitality stems from the innate intelligence within nature, this includes soils, plants, animals, and humans. The philosophy of vitalism based on the understanding that life cannot be explained in purely mechanical terms can inspire us in ways to nurture the innate intelligence of life itself. Revitalising agriculture means we must remember that the things we can measure are not more important than the things we cannot measure.
Restoring vitality in agriculture relies on rebuilding our relationship with nature and ourselves. Remembering we are nature; what we do to the Earth we do to ourselves. There is no separation. Healthy relationships are built on communication and mutuality, rather than exploitation and extraction. Our relationship with nature becomes dysfunctional when we expect that there must always be some form of monetary exchange in it for us. We live in a world where money is a human constructed form of exchange to represent value. Our relationship with money will also transform when we remember that money is only one form of wealth and that some forms of wealth are inherently more valuable than money. We can’t eat money!
In complex systems the problem we perceive is often not the actual problem, it’s a symptom of something else. Our addiction to quick fix solutions then creates more problems. For example, approaching weeds only as if they were a sign of a herbicide deficiency instead of considering the ecological, successional reasons they are growing worsens the problem through creating even more perfect conditions for these colonising plants to thrive. Living in complexity without creating bigger problems requires us to stop going with the first right answer, slow down and dig deeper into the whole system to address the root causes of challenges we face. Remembering that nature has an innate intelligence that provides the ability to establish, maintain and restore health that we can co-operate with rather than force and control.
Bringing agriculture back to life also restores life to ourselves and our communities. Life begets life. We can’t know all the answers ahead of time yet if we don’t change direction, it’s easy to see where we are going to end up. Change can be hard but not changing will make everything harder.
*true profit: Profit is the economic surplus produced by a business over a measured period. Because profit is a surplus, the asset base (including the health of people & land) from which it is generated must remain intact or long term profitability will decline.