Modern agriculture, based mainly on massive monoculture of a handful of crop species worldwide (wheat, rice, maize, sugar cane and a few other grass species, together with soya beans, cotton, potatoes) is in trouble. The scale of these monocultures, covering previously natural landscapes, has displaced increasingly large amounts of the natural biodiversity which is central to the sustainability of life on the planet.

Natural biodiversity, from minute soil-borne organisms to the largest predators, forms complex webs of interaction which are all involved in the delivery of ‘ecosystem services’. These can be categorised into four types (which, inevitably, overlap greatly):

• Provisioning – wild foods and medicines from land and water, water itself, energy
• Regulating – carbon sequestration, climate regulation, nutrient cycling through decomposition, purification of water and air, pest and disease regulation
• Supporting – nutrient dispersal and cycling, seed dispersal
• Cultural – cultural, intellectual and spiritual inspiration – taken together, they form the ‘Gaia effect’ – the extraordinary system of biological regulation of the environment of planet Earth.

In addition to the biodiversity displacement, the crop monocultures are only able to function effectively because of the application to them of very large amounts of synthetic ‘inputs’ (fertilisers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, molluscicides, growth regulators) which are based on fossil oils as a raw material and provider of energy for processing. Large amounts of fossil oil are also used to cultivate the land and process the food that is harvested from it.

Partly because of these processes, we are also faced with the global problems of climate change and destabilisation (don’t believe the so-called ‘climate change deniers’ – as scientists, all the climate change analysts are deniers themselves, constantly questioning all of the data generated and its interpretation).

And, of course, the price of oil continues to rise as it becomes more and more expensive to extract the declining reserve.

How did all of this happen?

From the time of the agricultural revolution (say, 1700 to 1900 in this country), there was a gradual move towards intensification and simplification, helped by the discovery of cheap fossil energy – and boosted by the 1947 Agriculture Act which, post-World War 2, opened the way for a massive increase in production and commodification of agricultural crops.

The whole change was characterised by a gradual separation of agriculture and the natural world – to the extent that we now find people talking about ‘parks and prairies’. This is the notion that, to deal with human population growth, agriculture should be concentrated in ‘prairie’ areas with even greater intensification of production. At the same time, the natural world will be restricted to ‘parks’ or reserves where we can all go for walks or fishing or watching the few remaining birds (which were probably released from some artificial breeding centre).

The missing link

The big idea that was missed in agriculture – though it had profound effects in the rest of society – was Darwin’s Origin of Species. The two quotes above say it all. The natural world functions though the interactions among all of the many organisms in soil, water and air. This had been recognised by farmers over thousands of years. Their understanding was superficial (we still don’t know how all of it works – it is unbelievably complex), but it was in the right direction. In recent years, ecologists have shown how immensely productive natural systems can be even though there are no inputs other than sun, air, soil and water.

Of course, natural systems are more difficult to deal with in terms of harvesting, for example. So, what we need to do is to find a compromise between appropriate agricultural systems and the natural world approach – to integrate ‘parks’ and ‘prairies’. This is ‘agroforestry’. If we maximise the natural, ecological part of the approach, by maximising diversity (what we are now calling ‘eco-agroforestry’), we can have high overall productivity with minimal use of inputs (we only ‘import’ diesel for the tractors, together with seeds).

Across the sixty acres (23 hectares) of Wakelyns, we have six slightly different ‘alley-cropping’ systems which demonstrate some of the possibilities and potentials of eco-agroforestry. We hope you find them interesting!