Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

difference between good farming and the most profitable farming. Still, he
points out that everybody need not be a farmer in an agrarian society, nor
need industrial production be limited to the bare necessities. The distinction
in Berry’s view is that agriculture and manufacturing in an agrarian
society would be tailored to the local landscape. While it is difficult to reconcile
current trends with this vision for an agrarian economy, a reoriented
capitalism is not unimaginable. After all, today’s quasi-sovereign global
corporations were inconceivable just a few centuries ago.
Agriculture has experienced several revolutions in historical times: the
yeoman’s revolution based on relearning Roman soil husbandry and the
agrochemical and green revolutions based on fertilizer and agrotechnology.
Today, the growing adoption of no-till and organic methods is fostering a
modern agrarian revolution based on soil conservation. Whereas past agricultural
revolutions focused on increasing crop yields, the ongoing one
needs to sustain them to ensure the continuity of our modern global
civilization.
The philosophical basis of the new agriculture lies in treating soil as a
locally adapted biological system rather than a chemical system. Yet agroecology
is not simply a return to old labor-intensive ways of farming. It is
just as scientific as the latest genetically modified technologies—but based
on biology and ecology rather than chemistry and genetics. Rooted in the
complex interactions between soil, water, plants, animals, and microbes,
agroecology depends more on understanding local conditions and context
than on using standardized products or techniques. It requires farming
guided by locally adapted knowledge—farming with brains rather than by
habit or convenience.
Agroecology doesn’t mean simply going organic. Even forgoing pesticides,
California’s newly industrialized organic factory farms are not necessarily
conserving soil. When demand for organic produce began to skyrocket
in the 1990s, industrial farms began planting monocultural stands
of lettuce that retained the flaws of conventional agriculture—just without
the pesticides.
Agroecology doesn’t necessarily mean small farms instead of large farms.
Haiti’s tiny peasant farms destroyed soil on steep slopes just as effectively
as the immense slave-worked plantations of the American South. And the
problem isn’t just mechanization. Roman oxen slowly stripped soil as effectively
as the diesel-powered descendants of John Deere’s plows. The underlying
problem is confoundingly simple: agricultural methods that lose soil
life span of civilizations 241