Ecoagriculture for a Sustainable Food Future

Nicole Y. Chalmer

• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781486313433
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Agricultura sostenible

Global food security is dependent on ecologically viable production systems, but current agricultural practices are often at odds with environmental sustainability. Resolving this disparity is a huge task, but there is much that can be learned from traditional food production systems that persisted for thousands of years.

Ecoagriculture for a Sustainable Food Future describes the ecological history of food production systems in Australia, showing how Aboriginal food systems collapsed when European farming methods were imposed on bushlands. The industrialised agricultural systems that are now prevalent across the world require constant input of finite resources, and continue to cause destructive environmental change.

This book explores the damage that has arisen from farming systems unsuited to their environment, and presents compelling evidence that producing food is an ecological process that needs to be rethought in order to ensure resilient food production into the future.

Cultural sensitivity
Readers are warned that there may be words, descriptions and terms used in this book that are culturally sensitive, and which might not normally be used in certain public or community contexts. While this information may not reflect current understanding, it is provided by the author in a historical context.

1

Transformations of nature and people

Food production is the largest cause of environmental change [and has always been].¹

The socioeconomic activities of virtually all societies have resulted in the simplification of their natural environments.²

The foundational pillars of any society are amazingly simple – good water and good food. Without them, no human or non-human can exist as individuals or as societies. Producing food should not be taken for granted, for the future of Australian and all human societies depends upon the long-term sustainability of their food producing systems. Societies can only persist if the essential soil foundations and ecosystem functions on farms and their surrounding environments are healthy and sustainable. Degradation of these vital resources cannot be dismissed as an externality to unlimited economic growth – a fantastical human idea when planet Earth has finite resources. Yet in Australia economic, social and political imperatives are given far greater importance than long-term sustainable food production systems. It seems that, as outlined by Tim Flannery’s book The Future Eaters, we in Australia are still happily eating our future and leaving a trail of degraded environments behind.³

Human food production systems have been key drivers of the major environmental changes throughout Australia from the deep past to the present. Food production is accepted as the largest single source of environmental change and degradation on the planet, as forests are cleared, other ecosystems lost, soils are degraded and desertified, and finite resources are exploited. It is a key factor in climate change.¹ There was a time before present agriculture where people did interact more closely with landscape ecologies and culturally recognised their dependence upon a healthy biodiverse productive nature. Food meant a huge range of edibles. It was not based upon the comparatively few species of today, for which humanity has remodelled and transformed much of the world.

Farming in Australia is a fragile business. It is particularly fragile in southern Western Australian sandplain landscapes (and parallel places throughout Australia) where there are inbuilt natural constraints that must be overcome to allow the ‘normal’ modern farming systems based on introduced plants and animals to continue. To grow the foods that our society regards as edible and normal, landowners must fundamentally change these ancient soils with continual inputs of mineral fertilisers containing phosphorus (P), nitrogen (N) and potassium (K), lime and gypsum and numerous essential trace minerals including cobalt (Co), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), molybdenum (Mb) and selenium (Se). With so many inputs needed for most Western Australian farmed soils and so many nationwide, there is little ability to compete in a level playing field with other industrialised farming systems in the western world. The younger more fertile soils of Europe, the Mediterranean and the Americas where most domesticated plants and animals evolved, generally have intrinsic soil properties with greater fertility and resilience to modern farming systems. These overseas farm competitors start so far in front in their ability to grow grain, meat and other produce, it is remarkable that Australian farms perform as well as they do.

Over 63% of the Australian landmass is divided into land ownership titles or leases and is under the control or ownership of corporate and individual farmers, graziers and pastoralists. Other than pastoral leases, the land ownership laws of our cultural system mostly allow landowners to do what they want on their land. But it is time to understand that these owned lands are essentially under generational stewardship for we should be passing them on to the next generation in the same or better condition than they are now. With productivist aims dominating agriculture, there is little emphasis placed on the importance of loving Country and managing land and soils in terms of ecological knowledge and respect for their long-term future. The agribusiness attitude is that a farm is a business only, and that agricultural business owners cannot afford to, are by heritage unable to, or should not bother with forming the emotional attachment to Country that is so often cited as of utter importance to Indigenous peoples. This emotive feeling needs to be felt by all those who have the responsibility of looking after so much of Australia for future generations of people, plants, animals and ecosystems. These feelings need to be reinforced and legitimised in the activity of agriculture which is not only an economic system but a lifeway connecting ecology, cultural systems and emotional feelings of belonging. Learning about the ecology of agriculture and the landscapes in which it is conducted should be mandatory to farm or manage land in Australia.

I am connected to the land we farm at Esperance, even though its seasons are less predictable, and it lacks the rainfall of Denmark and Mt Barker where we farmed before. Here in the Esperance bioregion the land was treated cruelly during the 1960s to 1980s. There were vast unruly acts of overclearing that vandalised the riparian vegetation of rivers and creeks, lakes and wetlands – land that has only become saltier and more prone to flooding since clearing. Our farm, as one of the last sandplain farms cleared, was treated a little better with a large semi-permanent lake and smaller lakes and wetlands still surrounded by their original vegetation of freshwater paperbarks and yate forest. So much of the Esperance sandplain was indiscriminately cleared that those patches remaining have been listed as critically endangered ecological communities. They represent some of the 393 critically endangered Western Australian ecological communities.⁴ While mosaics of bush and trees were retained when the Mallee region was originally cleared in the 1920s, many of these were destroyed with the introduction of bulldozers in the 1960s. They have also been listed as critically endangered ecological communities.

On our farm we have aimed to maximise habitats and biodiversity within the landscape by fencing off precious bushland areas against livestock degradation. To stabilise the once poor and drifting cleared sands with perennial grasses, the soils have needed re-engineering with quality annual legumes and grasses and a clay spreading program to improve water- and nutrient-holding capacity and the ability to build soil carbon. For the kind of agriculture that is acceptable within our culture and from which we earn money, we rely mostly upon quality non-native pastures that need soils re-engineered by generous fertilising each year with phosphorus and potash- based fertilisers which not only directly feed the plants but also indirectly feed the new commensal soil biology and animal grazers. Adding fertilisers also replaces nutrients removed in the biomass of cattle, sheep, wool and crops taken from the farm and sold. The various trace elements are also absolutely essential but are applied less frequently because of their cost. Summer rainfall events allow the perennials to flourish, turning the farm a rich living green and preventing significant runoff and wind and water erosion as well as fixing atmospheric carbon in the soils as organic carbon and plant phytoliths.^5,i

The potential for complexity and biodiversity above ground and in soils is generally greater on farms that specialise in livestock where there is potentially greater diversity of habitats in soils, mixed pastures and fenced bush mosaics. Biological simplification is often featured on large cropping properties geared towards monocultures, which may have either poor quality or no native vegetation left. The important soil biology has declined due to yearly chemical applications and long periods of heat and dryness when nothing is allowed to grow during summer to conserve soil moisture. Because larger wildlife such as kangaroos and emus have a definite impact on returns, as they graze on and flatten crops, they are rarely tolerated. Continued salinisation due to overfilling of aquifers is also an inevitable by-product in cropping systems and annual plant based grazing landscapes for, with summer rainfall, water use does not balance rainfall at critical times.

The Esperance bioregion encompasses a huge area, approximating 42 546 km² surrounding the town of Esperance (population about 14 500), on Western Australia’s south-east coast. It includes a variety of ecosystems found within the coastal zone, sandplain, mallee and mallee woodlands going to Israelite Bay and north to Norseman across to Fraser Range and Balladonia. Though the sandplain is typically considered a Western Australian landform, similar sandplain, mallee and woodlands ecosystems are found in in south-west New South Wales, north-west Victoria and southern South Australia. This bioregion was one of the most recently settled areas in southern Western Australia. It has been acknowledged as a hotspot of farming flexibility for its adoption of novel farming technologies and the production of innovative methods that range from technological (spreading hundreds of kilograms per hectare of clay on sandy soils to increase water and nutrient holding capacity) to biological (introducing perennial plants into pasture systems to give year-round green feed for livestock). These have allowed agri-system earnings to be improved while continuing with farming as usual. This region also represents a microcosm of the farming, environmental and economic problems afflicting farming, grazing and non-farmed landscapes Australia-wide: salinisation, soil degradation, loss of habitat, loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires, water scarcity, climate change, social disruptions and the general population’s cultural disconnection from the land.

As humans we rarely think about a world without us. Philosopher Francis Bacon went as far as to claim:

Man, if we look to final causes, may be regarded as the centre of the world … insomuch that if man were taken away from the world, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or purpose.⁶

Before humans arrived, Australia thrived as landscapes of nature. Human activities drove rapid changes that overwhelmed the sustainability and resilience of systems, as the biodiversity and ecosystem processes of nature were destroyed. After their early damaging impacts, the first human Australian societies co-adapted with the ecosystems and species left. For at least 50 000 years they had keystone roles in maintaining relatively biodiverse ecosystems bountiful with plant and animal food. So tightly bound were most Australian ecosystems to Aboriginal land management systems, that when the next human invasion arrived in the late 18th century from Great Britain and Europe there was a rapid cascade of destructive ecosystem changes and species loss as the invasion wave spread. Colonial settlement throughout Australia directly displaced Aboriginal people from the most desirable and choicest landscape areas that had the best attributes of soil types and water availability.

To properly understand how humans fit into the world, we need to accept that we are ecological beings and in doing so accept the ecological perspectives of anthropogenic landscape change. In modern Australian food production systems research, this approach seems to have been little used. The progressive replacement of highly integrated food–culture–ecological elements within Indigenous systems with colonial and then industrialised modern food systems is accepted as a progression from past primitiveness to modern advancement. There is an implicit belief that present industrialised agricultural food systems are superior to those of the Aboriginal past. This reflects an arrogant assumption that, despite being in Australia for little more than 200 years, we recent invaders know more about managing this country than those who lived here for 50 000 years or more. At the other extreme are the unrealistic conservation science beliefs that a pre-European invasion nature can be somehow functionally restored, despite lacking Aboriginal people living with and managing ecosystems for food production day after day for generations.

The future sustainability of food production desperately needs ecological wisdom from human ecological history and the deep pre-human history of animal and plant ecosystems. This does not necessarily mean re-creating exact past ecologies, because so many of the important species and management systems are gone. However, mimics of these past ecological processes with introduced animal and plant species and modified management systems could work. There are some important ecological concepts that underpin the approaches I take in this book as we proceed through time to understand Australia’s human food ecology.

Social ecological systems and agro-ecosystems

Unlike other planets in the solar system, ...