Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Soviet collapse, Cuba began privatizing industrialized state farms; staterun
farms were divided among former employees, creating a network of
small farms. Government-sponsored farmers’ markets brought peasant
farmers higher profits by cutting out intermediaries. Major government
programs encouraged organic agriculture and small-scale farming on
vacant city lots. Lacking access to fertilizers and pesticides, the food grown
in the new small private farms and thousands of tiny urban market gardens
became organic not through choice but through necessity.
Charged with substituting knowledge-intensive agriculture for the
embargoed inputs needed for conventional agriculture, the country’s
research infrastructure built on experiments in alternative agriculture that
had languished under the Soviet system but were available for widespread,
and immediate, implementation under the new reality.
Cuba adopted more labor-intensive methods to replace heavy machinery
and chemical inputs, but Cuba’s agricultural revolution was not simply
a return to traditional farming. Organic farming is not that simple. You
cannot just hand someone a hoe and order them to feed the proletariat.
Cuba’s agricultural transformation was based as much on science as was the
Soviet era’s high-input mechanized farming. The difference was that the
conventional approach was based on applied chemistry, whereas the new
approach was based on applied biology—on agroecology.
In a move pretty much the opposite of the green revolution that transformed
global agriculture based on increased use of irrigation, oil, chemical
fertilizers and pesticides, the Cuban government adapted agriculture to
local conditions and developed biological methods of fertilization and pest
control. It created a network of more than two hundred local agricultural
extension offices around the country to advise farmers on low-input and
no-till farming methods, as well as biological pest control.
Cuba stopped exporting sugar and began to grow its own food again.
Within a decade, the Cuban diet rebounded to its former level without food
imports or the use of agrochemicals. The Cuban experience shows that
agroecology can form a viable basis for agriculture without industrial methods
or biotechnology. Unintentionally, the U.S. trade embargo turned
Cuba into a nation-scale experiment in alternative agriculture.
Some look to the Cuban example as a model for employing locally
adapted ecological insight and knowledge instead of standardized mechanization
and agrochemistry to feed the world. They see the solution not
simply as producing cheap food, but keeping small farms—and therefore
farmers—on the land, and even in cities. Thousands of commercial urban
islands in time 231