Ecology and Farming

The milk from Thicke’s cows is bottled on the
farm and sold by local businesses under the farm’s
own label - Radiance Dairy. Milk customers in
surrounding communities buy all the milk he can
produce. There are now seven such grass-based
micro-dairies in Iowa and customers who purchase
the products from these dairies reportedly wait for
their milk, because “it tastes so good.”
Thicke also keeps free range chickens on this farm
because they eat the fly larvae in the cow manure,
reducing fly populations sufficiently so that he does
not require any fly control measures in his dairy
barn. And, of course, the chickens are an additional
source of income.
The New Systems of the Future
These examples begin to model what our post-
industrial agriculture may look like and Organic
Agriculture is in a good position to take the lead in
developing this new agriculture. The new agriculture
likely will feature at least eight principles which are
almost diametrically opposed to the principles by
which industrial agriculture has operated for the
past half century. The new systems will be:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Energy conserving,
Driven by biological synergies,
Self-regulating and self-renewing,
Interdependent,
Shift from an extraction and preservation
6.
7.
8.
duality model to an ecological restoration
model,
Increase biological and genetic diversity,
Use adaptive management rather than control
management, and
Produce adequate food through multi-product,
synergistic production systems, featuring
nutrient density, rather than monocultures that
solely focus on yield maximization.
Sixty years ago the noted ecologist Aldo Leopold
foresaw the limitations of the industrial food
and farming system and predicted its demise: “It
was inevitable and no doubt desirable that the
tremendous momentum of industrialization should
have spread to farm life. It is clear to me, however,
that it has overshot the mark . . . It is generating
new insecurities, economic and ecological, in place
of those it was meant to abolish. In its extreme
form, it is humanly desolate and economically
unstable. These extremes will some day die of their
own too-much, not because they are bad for wildlife,
but because they are bad for the farmer”.
That “some day” is now rapidly approaching and
while the new farming systems based on biological
synergies may not all have animals in them, like
nature, most of them probably will.
Special Feature: Animals in Organic Production
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