How do we achieve balance?
I tend to think of balance in terms of daily habits. Did I get enough sleep last night? Did I take enough steps? Did I have healthy meals?
But, maybe balance isn't achieved through day-to-day decisions. Maybe it's something achieved in the long term. It takes trial and error. It involves learning and evolving. It requires comfort with complexity.
My values this week are persistence and adaptivity. As we discussed in class and saw in The Biggest Little Farm, farming is far from an easy profession. You have to get up early, do hard physical labour, and manage new problems every day. Even when you do everything right...there is no guarantee of success. You can lose everything.
But when you persist and adapt, the results eventually come. In both The Biggest Little Farm and Kiss the Ground, independent farmers were successful when going against traditional wisdom. While an unconventional rewilding approach resulted in significant early setbacks, John and Molly Chester ultimately built a successful, self-regulating farm. After four seasons with virtually no crops, Gabe Brown changed to a more productive regenerative ranching approach, without tillage or the use of any synthetics.
I envision a world where policy encourages adaptive long-term farming practices. One of the main pitfalls we fall into when addressing environmental issues is providing short-term solutions. However, the potential of long-term solutions, such as rewilding and regenerative ranching, seems quite limited. How can we implement such practices at a larger scale? Won't more land be needed?
We won't know until we try.
My proposed intervention is for governments to provide subsidies for local farmers engaging in long-term agricultural experiments. By incentivizing experiments that test the efficacy of sustainable agricultural practices at a local level, more cost-efficient yet sustainable solutions may be identified that can be adopted at an industrial level. The money to fund such experiments would be drawn from subsidies given to major industrial agricultural companies. While such companies would lobby heavily against this idea, it would be an effective compromise. Companies may suffer financially in the short term from less subsidies, but will recuperate costs in the long-term from the insights gained through experimentation.
@CoSphere
Thanks for sharing these points, they're very well laid out! I agree that a major roadblock to farmers in switching to regenerative farming is the massive risk it entails, and subsidies would be able to alleviate some of this. Other than starting at a local level, I wonder what the most effective way to reduce lobbying would be?
Hi Philip! I never really realized this function here on CoSphere that lets you make the important things bold and noticeable. I agree with the others who have commented in that your post has so many great points. Hopefully corporations and companies will be open-minded enough to suffer short-term losses in exchange for a brighter long-term future.
Hi Philip! I think you bring to light a hard truth; that sometimes we have to go through trial and error to find what works and too often, we don't want to risk trying if we have to risk failing. I think you bring really concrete ideas and have a clear vision for investigating how we can make improvements right now. Really great post! Thanks for sharing.
Great post Philip!! Your writing style is very engaging. I like your optimism when you say "we won't know until we try". Indeed, we need to try something new because our current food systems are making the environment and people sick.