What if we worked with nature, not against it?
My vision is for agricultural practices to move away from monocultures, pesticides, and Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) and embrace more diverse, perennial polycultures. I envision thriving health for farms, nature, and people, alike.
I value working towards a world with greater sustainability, including agriculture. Working with population dynamics and ecosystem cycles builds resilience and diversity. Nature is the manifestation of millions of years of evolution – it offers a wealth of ecological mechanisms that can be applied to agriculture.
I aspire for a compiled collection of interventions to tackle the problem of modern agriculture from different sides. A common theme I have noticed splattered across the bloody history of times where science does damage is as follows: simplistic, one-sided, monopolistic, and/or unchallenged approaches may overlook the whole issue. Life is complicated and thus warrants solutions to encompass a wide range of tactics.
Governments should establish a committee with interdisciplinary researchers to design a sustainable agriculture plan. The current agricultural subsidies in Canada (and worldwide) should redistribute these funds to subsidize polycultures and tax monocultures via said detailed plan. For example, positive incentives could include using cover crops and a variety of crops. Another potential positive incentive could be falling within an appropriate grazing animal-to-land ratio range (perhaps different among animals). Disincentives should be implemented for using monocultures, pesticides/herbicides, CAFOs, and chemical fertilizers. Perhaps to exaggerate the positive incentives and disincentives, governments could employ a tiered rewards system up to a predetermined limit for each element.
Very informative post, and great image to go along with.
Well structured and highly informational as always, love it! I also believe that governments could leverage a lot with the right taxes and subsidies.
I love how your post made me feel empowered rather that like I would have to minimize myself to do your solutions. You presented so many good ideas and I loved how organized your points were!
Inez, I love how you have approached this week! So much of what I look forward to and want to foster in my community is what you have described here...giving people the tools to farm in more ecologically aware ways, and giving support in going through this process.
Hi Inez!,
I love your image, it really drew me to your post! I also love your vision for a more biodiverse future when it comes to farming practices. I share this vision for the future and I really hope that going forward more people learn about and try to adopt these practices of sustainable farming. I think that it was great that you mentioned the implementation of committees dedicated to finding multifaceted solutions to these big problems because that is a much better way to face them then from the classic smoking gun kind of approach.
Hi Inez Verdun, I absolutely love the idea of allocating the money for subsidies towards the education and long term implementation of sustainable farming practices that are healthier for our land, food, and planet! I also love that you added a picture. I really would love to see more silvopasture adopted in Canada.
Hi Inez,
Also love your idea of a tiered system for incentives! I think thinks this presents a way for a shift from our current agricultural systems to a more holistic system to occur more gradually - from weening of the products or structures that are de-incentivized, to slowly replacing said structures with the means that are incentivized. In other words, a farmer is able to work their way up the ladder of sustainable agriculture. What's great about this is I think a gradual approach will be more accepted and easily implemented than an drastic change for all aspects of agriculture all at once!
Hello Inez! These are wonderful ideas, especially the tiered rewards system which I found interesting- and thanks for sharing such an adorable image! I definitely think rallying the government to design a more sustainable agriculture plan would be a great first step. I appreciate how in-depth you nailed it with polycultures/tax monocultures which led me to looking more of these issues up on Google
That's a good idea, Inez. We should work with nature. In the farming era thousands of years ago, people could live with nature and farm, and at that time, there was no excessive demand for food, no need for hormones and pesticides, and the whole ecology maintained a good relationship. We need to maintain sustainable agriculture, and it is necessary to establish an institution to designate policies to promote and protect the development of agriculture.
God, I love your perspective so much.
My fantasy is that the whole world is one big farm, and I love the model of northern peoples with animals, the kind where sheepdogs can run wild and sheep and cattle and horses can be everywhere, without any malicious competition, much less onerous policies. All just one.
Of course this is unrealistic, I'm just foolishly fantasizing about it...
I like your proposal for a committee, and feel that this would ensure that all aspects are taken into account.
This is exactly it! This is how I feel about our current agriculture systems and where I also believe we should be headed. Who are we to say we know more than thousands of years of evolution and nature surviving perfectly fine without us?! I think you've said it much more eloquently than I have, but essentially recreating the diverse polycultures we'd see growing naturally together (because they do so for a reason!) would greatly help our crop productivity and overall environmental health.
My background is in marine biology. So forgive me if this is a little off topic. I have always been fascinated by aquatic ecosystems ability to recirculate nutrients within the system. An example of this is aquaponics where fish, planta, bacteria, and bio filters work in “harmony” to recirculate nutrients and water. This process allows the flora and fauna to thrive symbiotically. My question to you is: Do you think we have the capabilities to develop a terrestrial agricultural system that mimics aquaponics ability to recycle nutrients and waste?