The gardeners shall inherit the earth

Its becoming clearer to people that mechanised, chemical farming comes with a very high energy cost. Organic farming is an improvement as there is no use of chemical fertilisers which themselves require significant amounts of energy to produce. However, the mechanised aspect largely remains and in fact, organic farming can mean an increase in the use of machinery to keep crops weed free. Then of course as the food is usually grown a considerable distance from where it is eaten, there's the energy costs of transportation and often additional costs through processing.
 
On a square metre by square metre comparison, gardening is far more productive, energy efficient and ultimately profitable than both conventional, mechanised, chemical agriculture and organic farming. For a start, even in a temperate climate, a gardener can usually get two (and sometimes three) different crops in the same square metre during the course of a year (stacking in time, in terms of permaculture principles), whereas conventional mechanised agriculture will tend towards just one, leaving the ground bare for part of the year.

A gardener can also grow two (or more) different types of crop in the same square metre at the same time (companion planting, or stacking in space). The individual yields from each species may be lower than growing them by themselves but the sum of the yields is greater. If the companions are carefully chosen to be mutually beneficial, the individual yields may actually be higher. My great friend and gardener, Mistress Lou, grows runner beans with sweetcorn and squash in the same space, for example.

And why stop at just two or three when more complex polycultures can be even more productive? If we enlarge our square metre to say five, then we gardeners can squeeze in a food tree as well and develop food forest gardens that begin to mimic the complexity of natural systems; self watering, self mulching, self fertilising. Yet all this is far too complex for mechanised agriculture to manage and harvest, so management and yield of complex food systems is intimately related to scale.

One of the mistakes made during the (so called) green revolution in our thinking on world food production was to measure only in terms of single yield systems, any comparisons always being made against mechanised, chemical, agriculture. Thus when conventional agriculturalists measured yields in “poor” countries, they measured, for example, the total yield of wheat per acre. This involved discounting the other crops that the “poor” farmers grew with their wheat; anything that wasn’t wheat was seen as a "weed", a problem.

So two or more other crops that were in there with the wheat, often other types of grain, were discounted. The resulting yield for the wheat that was left could then be declared low in comparison to mechanised, chemical agriculture. The result was that the “poor” farmers were encouraged to use chemical fertilisers to boost their wheat yield and herbicides to knock out the “weeds”.

Thus we repeated our historic simplification of polycultures, of complex systems, reducing them to monocultural, single species deserts that made the majority of people redundant and sent them off to cities looking for work while binding the remainder to chemical inputs. Bah!

I recently saw "Power in Community" as part of a local transition town initiative. The film documents Cuba's experience of the near total collapse in its oil supply that occurred as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the US trade embargo. Once cheap oil is removed from the equation, everything has to change. Food becomes local and organic, more people become involved in growing (in Cuba, up from less than 5% of the population to 24%), obesity disappears, the population becomes fitter, the status of small scale farmers (gardeners) becomes much enhanced and they become relatively wealthy.

In the future, the bulk of the food grown on the planet will be grown not on farms but in gardens and market gardens; I look forward to the time when the gardeners shall inherit the earth.