Chapter 15
The Circular Economy of Food Production
IN THIS CHAPTER
Developing an understanding of agriculture and permaculture
Differentiating between monocultures and polycultures
Identifying the value of (and the relationship between) soil life, biomass, and organic waste
You probably don’t remember a time when agriculture wasn’t a major food industry. We humans live in a world where you can't miss the endless rows of single crops — corn, soybeans, grapes — that stand out like sore thumbs compared to the natural environment around them. The pattern stands out for a reason: Those tightly controlled rows are unnatural and result in a large amount of wasted food, energy, and time. They’re part of a linear economy.
The natural world is a powerful, abundant, and living system that’s just begging us humans to join the circular economy club. The natural world processes organic waste — dead foliage, microorganisms, and other once-living elements of the ecosystem — to serve as food for newly born plants and animals. The foliage that falls from a tree is softened by the rain that falls from the sky and is later consumed by insects such as ants, beetles, and worms. The waste that those insects leave behind acts as a nutrient source to feed the tree, allowing it to produce new leaves. Each of these elements of the ecosystem uses waste as a resource. They’re part of a circular economy.
Unfortunately, because agriculture focuses on a linear way of managing material and energy, every part of it has been designed to act as individual elements, not as part of a system. The way food is planted, grown, harvested, and distributed isn’t a sustainable way of serving the ever-growing needs of an ever-growing, global population.
In this chapter, you find out exactly why the current way of producing food — large-scale agriculture — is such a serious problem and a detriment to natural ecosystems. You’ll also find out what a circular economy looks like in food production, the basics of how to design your own food forest, which principles should guide your design, and which benefits you’ll reap!
Examining the Two Ways of Producing Food
The way food is produced can be categorized in one of two ways: the industrial chain (monocultures) and the local, food forest chain (polyculture).
The industrial chain is unique in the sense that only one crop is grown — hence the name monoculture. Thousands, sometimes millions, of seeds are planted in straight rows by fossil-fueled machinery, are watered by large sprinklers, and are fed and protected via commercial-grade fertilizers and pesticides. This is an energy- and time-intensive means to grow food. Monoculture have become the go-to strategy for growing food in industrialized nations because it holds a smaller initial cost than polycultures by relying on artificial inputs rather than ecosystem services. Ecosystem Services are benefits provided to humans by natural systems, such as water filtration and raw material generation. Although monocultures hold lower initial costs, this industrialized food production process damages the ability for natural systems to provide those services and generates the demand for those resources to be remediated in the future. Remediating millions of acres globally will come at a colossal price.
The local food forest chain, unlike agriculture, produces a wide array of plants that are intermingled to minimize the external resources required to feed and protect them To eliminate waste from production, keep nutrients in circulation and allow for natural systems to regenerate, polycultures utilize ecosystem services and symbiotic relationships, also known as companion planting — a food growing strategy that allows certain partnering plants to provide services for other plants by sharing resources, like nutrients and water. A polyculture, in other words This is an energy- and time-efficient means to grow food, because human intervention is rarely required.
The distinction between industrial chain versus food forest chain allows us authors to define the key difference between the two: The industrialized model produces 30 percent of the food, but uses 70 percent of the resources, whereas the food forest produces 70 percent of the food and uses only 30 percent of the resources. As efficient as polyculture systems are, they’re rarely seen in developed nations due to their higher initial cost. The rest of this chapter explains why.
To quickly identify the health of any food system, check for diversity. The quality and health of a food system is ultimately dependent on the diversity of plants incorporated into that system, the diversity of products extracted from that system, and the diversity of waste returned to the system. If the food system isn’t circular, it isn’t sustainable. It’s as simple as that, really. Compare the lush tropical rain forests of South America to the vast, single-row, industrialized fields seen around the industrialized world. Only one of these systems will survive in the long run.
Investigating the Hidden Costs of Agriculture
The industrial way of growing food is … well, it’s pretty dumb (and we certainly don’t mean in the cool For Dummies way). As smart as the human race claims to be, we humans aren’t smart when it comes to large-scale food production. We rely on agriculture to produce and distribute much of our food worldwide. This 70-year-old globalized phenomenon is not only relatively young, at least when compared to the entire spectrum of human existence, but it also fails miserably to use resources efficiently and generates unfathomable amounts of waste.
Which came first — the chicken or the egg? The extensive use of agriculture or the growth in global population? Well, they both happened in tandem. To service a growing population, the introduction of chemicals and technologies — what we know today as modern agriculture — was popularized. And once access to food was no longer an issue, people felt comfortable to have more children. This positive feedback loop is the reason we humans find ourselves where we are today. (See Figure 15-1.)
Although agriculture has greatly increased our ability to feed more people and in some respect has saved countless lives, the industrialized form of food production acts as a Band-aid to a much larger issue: long-term access to food and resources to service a growing population. With the understanding that the current, industrialized way of growing food will be unable to service us forever, an alternative, sustainable means of producing food must be adopted to ensure that humans have a bright future.
As the global population continues to grow, so will the negative impacts that agriculture will have on our global ecosystems. So, despite the short-term benefits of modern agriculture methods — the linear economy approach to food production — the fact that it creates enormous amounts of waste and causes environmental degeneration and severe human health concerns cannot be ignored. To guarantee food security in the future, eliminate waste, regenerate natural systems, and resolve human health concerns, the circular economy must act as the new platform for global food production.
FIGURE 15-1: World population growth since 1700.
Food waste: Expending money, time, and resources unnecessarily
Agricultural waste comes in many forms, but we focus on only these three major sources:
- Labor costs: Huge and complex, the global monoculture, or conventional agriculture, system has been called by some the world’s largest industry, with over a billion people involved daily — that’s more than 10 percent of the global population, mind you — working each and every day to deliver food to your table. These laborers not only plant, maintain, fertilize, and harvest a range of food and agricultural products but also package, transport, market, sell, cook and/or deliver this food for you.
- Many of these human services — maintaining and fertilizing crops, for example — are necessary because of how the food is produced. These human services can be replaced with ecological services if a circular, rather than linear, economy of food production were used. Work smarter, not harder!
- Energy costs: Each and every day, gasoline and oil fuel the wide range of equipment necessary to maintain the linear way of producing food. In addition, fertilizers are required in order to supplement the soil nutrients that are no longer present in the soil while herbicides and pesticides are needed to keep weeds and pests away. All these products take large amounts of energy to produce; they’re also essential if you hope to perpetuate this linear way of producing food.
Food: Between one-third and one-half of the food produced in an industrialized setting is wasted. When food is grown in a field, it often takes days, if not weeks, until it is delivered to the consumer and eaten. This delay between harvest and consumption allows for many opportunities for food to spoil, if not properly stored, processed, or preserved.
A circular economy food production methodology would identify these elements of waste and adjust a range of lifecycle variables, such as source, means of transportation, storage opportunities, processing strategies, and other determinants to eliminate waste completely. The Maryland Food Bank’s FoodWorks Program, for example, teaches its students basic cooking skills while converting perishable foods into healthy meals for distribution to those in need. This strategy educates members of the community while eliminating food waste to service those who would go hungry without their support.
Once a circular economy of food production is utilized worldwide, many of these agricultural services provided by heavy machinery, fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides can be replaced with environmental services.
Environmental degeneration: Damaging the planet with increasing speed
The resources required to sustain this ever-growing snowball of madness that is our current food production system are vast: Fifty percent of the planet’s habitable land and 70 percent of fresh water resource demand is required by agriculture. These interlinkages reach far beyond the food system itself, directly impacting many other important physical and social systems, such as climate, energy, and water, as well as land use, biodiversity, and culture. As populations continue to grow, more natural landscapes are converted into fields for agricultural use. This degenerative action pollutes local watersheds, destroys habitats, erodes soils, and eliminates indigenous ways of life as well as the historic ways of that community.
Slash-and-burn farming is a common practice in the Amazon rainforest, where natural vegetation is cleared and burned as a way to prepare that land for cultivation. When that soil quickly becomes infertile because of this unnatural process, farmers then move on to new areas. The way food is produced is unnatural and causes widespread degradation to natural systems, making it harder and harder to produce food from the same area of soil.
Unfortunately, the short-term solution to this degradation of the soil was the introduction of petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, aimed at supplementing the natural services of ecosystems. All plants take water and nutrients from the soil, but they also leave something in return to help other plants, fungi, and animals around them grow. A food production system based on circular economy principles utilizes this collective impact to provide plants with their never-ending nutrient needs. Legumes, for example, (peas, clovers, beans) partner with a soil bacteria called rhizobium — Latin for “root living” — to extract nitrogen from the air and convert it into nitrates and nitrites, which can then be utilized by the plants around them. These services are extremely valuable, yet industrialized agriculture ignores them and relies on an array of unnatural chemicals instead.
Permaculture to the Rescue
Permaculture is an environmental design philosophy, developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s, that harnesses the power and functionality of natural systems to grow foods (rather than adopt the attitude of industrialized agriculture, which claims that the only way to grow food is to fight against natural systems). Though agriculture can be defined by monoculture crops, energy-intensive production, globalized distribution, and waste, permaculture can be defined by polyculture crops, energy-efficient production, local distribution, and resource recycling.
The truth is, the natural world could provide everyone with fresh, nutrient-rich produce if we humans would just let it do its thing and stay out of its way. By no means should you skip the farmers market and start picking at the wild vegetation outside the back door — that will more than likely lead to a bad itch and maybe even a trip to the ER. Instead, imagine relying on a circular food system that requires minimal human input and capitalizes on natural flows of nutrients, water, and biomass.
The circular economy of food isn’t a new concept, but is instead an idea that has existed for thousands of years. We humans have only just diverted from this way of life over the course of the past hundred years. Our ancestors understood that the ecosystem services around them were their source of life — by reconnecting with nature and designing our food systems to mimic the natural world, we too can once again source our food in a circular way.
Following nature’s lead: Permaculture design principles
Permaculture and its associated principles act as a design philosophy that allows the designer to harness the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems to minimize waste and produce high-quality environmental resources. Using natural systems and resource management as an example, permaculture founders Bill Mollison and David Holmgren distilled nature’s way of producing food into a set of 12 permaculture design principles. They argue that these principles, listed here, should be seen as a design framework and an opportunity to “think” as nature does:
Observe and interact (beauty is in the eye of the beholder):
Before you can design like nature, you need to understand how nature designs. Designers should observe the natural world, to not only appreciate how the natural world functions but also explore how we humans can duplicate its abundance.
Catch and store energy (make hay while the sun shines):
Energy should be captured and stored when it’s abundant and conserved when it’s rare. Value what is ample, and respect the use of what is available only occasionally.
Obtain a yield (you can’t work on an empty stomach):
By investing time, energy, and resources, value is created. Enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback (the sins of the fathers are visited on the children of the seventh generation):
The original research-and-development (R&D) system — nature — proposed that if you don’t fit in with your surroundings, you don’t survive. Success should be celebrated, and failure should be addressed, resolved, and prevented from happening again.
Use and value renewable resources and services (let nature take its course):
To assume that coal will last forever is foolish and extremely short-sighted. Rather than utilize finite resources, make use of resources that are fully renewable and abandon those that are not.
Produce no waste (waste not, want not):
Humans are the only living creatures on planet earth who produce waste. We need to acknowledge that waste is simply a resource that isn’t being used correctly. Eliminate waste by changing how materials and products are ultimately utilized.
Design from patterns to details (can’t see the forest for the trees):
Patterns like the golden ratio and the Fibonacci sequence are abundant in nature because they’re efficient. We should design our human systems as nature would design them — efficiently and beautifully.
Integrate rather than segregate (many hands make light work):
Plants thrive in collective systems but perish when in isolation. Develop polycultures that rely on collaboration and cooperation to maximize resilience and value.
Use small and slow solutions (the bigger they are, the harder they fall):
Although big changes can bring with them great reward, they can also bring with them large amounts of risk. This principle identifies the value of incremental changes.
Use and value diversity (don’t put all your eggs in one basket):
A diverse market is harder to crash. The tenth permaculture principle acknowledges that resilience is built on a platform of diversity. A disease can kill an entire monocrop field, but only minimally affects a polyculture.
Use edges and value the marginal (a well-beaten path isn’t always the right path):
A mangrove forest, which is located where salt water and fresh water meet — on the edge of both systems — is rich with life. Highlight the value that comes from adjacencies.
Creatively use and respond to change (vision is not seeing things as they are, but as they will be):
Change is inevitable and should be planned for. Everything changes — seasons, politics, human needs — so we should design for the future, not the present.
Figure 15-2 shows the 12 permaculture principles in graphical form.
FIGURE 15-2: The permaculture design principles.
Taking a look at permaculture management zones
Imagine you’ve decided to cook some pasta for yourself. As you’re cooking up some sauce, you remember the potted oregano you have growing just outside your kitchen door. After a quick 10 second walk, you’re dicing away and smelling the fresh oils spilling from the fresh herbs. Now imagine your herbs aren’t just outside your kitchen door, but are instead planted a quarter mile away on the other edge of your land. That wouldn’t be a sensible location for herbs because they’re quite frequently visited and/or attended to — sometime multiple times per day. An orchard, however, isn’t visited multiple times a day and is instead visited maybe two or three times per year for harvest. Therefore, it makes more sense to place your fruit trees further away from the home, rather than right outside your back door. This idea that travel time and frequency of use should dictate the location of your plants is the defining factor of Permaculture “zones.”
Permaculture zones are used as a design influence and organization tool for those who wish to develop their own polyculture systems. Not only are these zones individual important, but their adjacency to other zones is also a critical component to consider. If you rely on an open grassland to feed your cattle, goats or chickens, you would certainly want to minimize the distant between these two elements to efficiently manage your time. The more attention an element of your polyculture system requires, the closer it should be located to the nexus of human activity —the home. The less attention an element requires, the father away it should be. Given both time and energy are both hard to come by these days, by spending both on simply traveling between zones, you’ll certainly find that you’ll have less of both once you get to your destination.
No matter the size — an apartment herb garden or a 100-acre farm — permaculture zones are here to help you decide which plants should go where — and why. Figure 15-3 gives the details.
- Zone 0: House, dwelling, or settlement
- Zone 1: Areas needing continual observation
- Zone 2: Less intensively managed areas
- Zone 3: Occasionally visited areas that still form part of the system
- Zone 4: Wild food gathering, wood cutting for fuel
- Zone 5: Natural, unmanaged areas
FIGURE 15-3: Permaculture management zones.