There are many different ways that we can grow food and herbs more sustainably, all with their own benefits and limitations. This article explains some of the most popular forms of sustainable agriculture.
To the outsider, the movement for sustainable food may seem like a coherent block of people. But there are important differences and disagreements about the best approach to growing food without destroying the planet. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most popular, and consider their unique contributions to the movement in turn. We’ll start with the broader labels like ‘organic’ and ‘regenerative’, and then focus on more specific sustainable farming methods like ‘permaculture’ and ‘biodynamic’.
Organic agriculture
If you thought of all of the schools of sustainable agriculture as a Venn diagram, the largest and most encompassing would be ‘organic’.
Organic agriculture has its roots in the early part of the 20th century but really gained prominence in response to the large-scale introduction of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides after World War II. Advocates of organic agriculture saw farmland as a living set of relationships that chemical additives tended to disrupt in harmful ways. What they proposed as an alternative is a return to non-synthetic agriculture, relying on fertility from livestock manure or plant-based compost and using forms of pest control that don’t introduce toxic chemicals. Today the term organic also refers to non-genetically modified food.
The organic view on the importance of living relationships has since been vindicated by soil scientists who have identified how plants produce sugars in exchange for nitrogen from soil bacteria. Artificial fertilisers disrupt this relationship, making plants dependent on them and reducing soil quality over time.
Regenerative agriculture
Regenerative agriculture is a proposal which seeks to proactively reform farming techniques to heal some of the damage caused by industrial agriculture. The Groundswell Festival in the UK describes 5 principles of ‘regen ag’. All of them focus in some way on building and protecting soil health. The popular Netflix film Kiss the Ground has been a rallying call for this movement. It urges farmers to adopt plant cover crops over the winter months, rotate their crops and mulch where possible in order to build soil health and sequester carbon. The film’s popularity speaks to the way regenerative agriculture is moving into the mainstream.
This is undoubtedly a good thing, but there are some important critiques of the movement. A recent paper by Bless, Davila and Plant summarises the concerns (1). They argue, regenerative agriculture “fails to credit Indigenous practices it draws from” and “tends to overlook the needs of farmers in the Global South and broader power inequality in the food system.” Many enormous multinational companies with terrible environmental records are adopting regenerative agriculture as a marketing tool. Bless et al. argue that this raises “concerns companies may be using regenerative agriculture to “greenwash” their image”. I have explored this in more detail on my website in my article “Land, visions, fantasies and farmers“.
Instead, food justice activists point to ‘agroecology’ as a just alternative.
Agroecology
Agroecology originates in South America and is deeply interwoven with both indigenous worldviews and radical political movements (6). Unlike the ‘regenerative agriculture’ or ‘organic’ labels, this movement prioritises thinking about the social relationships that shape the way we grow food. This includes questions like, who owns land? What kind of relationship do they have with it? And, is growing food contributing to farmers’ domination by commodity markets or freeing them from it? (7)
While regenerative agriculture is being popularised by high-budget films and large corporations, agroecology is spreading via grassroots social movements committed to justice and human freedom. La Via Campesina, a global union of land workers, founded in 1993, has been campaigning for a just farming system ever since. It now has branches in over 80 countries.
Peter Rosset and others document how the survival of Afro and indigenous relationships to land has shaped this movement in important ways, committing it to food sovereignty, healing human relationships with land, and building a powerful political movement (2). In another recent paper, Emma Cardwell points to the ways that Global North countries like the UK can learn from this movement to decolonise our own food system (3).
These broad umbrella categories demarcate important differences in priorities and ambitions in the movement. At the same time, there are more specific differences emerging in approaches to cultivation.
You can learn more about the differences between organic and regenerative farming in our article Regenerative farming vs organic farming.
Biodynamic
‘Biodynamic’ is perhaps the one most shrouded in mystery. A small subsection of organic food is certified as biodynamic, and, in my experience, most people aren’t certain of what this label means.
Biodynamic farming is one of the older Global North methods for growing food sustainably. It is a school of thought founded by the controversial (and racist) German polymath Rudolf Steiner, upon whose philosophy Steiner schools are based. Steiner’s vision of biodynamic agriculture contains elements which resonate with all the other alternatives to agriculture we are discussing here. There are also aspects of his philosophy that many scientifically-minded horticulturists struggle with.
To start with the uncontroversial elements, biodynamic farming insists on perceiving the farm as an entire living system. All of the parts of the farm should be working together as a synchronised whole. This includes a particular attention to the health and fertility of the soil. In an ideal system, a farm would be able to generate enough fertility from the manure of livestock to avoid importing any from elsewhere. Steiner also advocates planting according to lunar and solar cycles. The length of days and position of the sun has a demonstrable impact on the development of plants, and, there is also evidence to suggest that when the moon is waxing, plants are able to more easily draw up water from the soil.
All of this lines up with the aims of many other alternative methodologies like permaculture or natural farming which we will explore later. Where Steiner veers into the mystical, many practitioners who like to base their decisions on verifiable evidence struggle (4). Steiner proposes eight ‘preparations’, variations of buried stuffed animal remains, which he believes channel “cosmic forces” into the soil.
Permaculture
Permaculture has become a much more widely implemented and developed growing methodology. A contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’, permaculture was conceived of by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the 1970s. After observing the havoc wreaked by industrial-scale agriculture on the ecosystems of Tasmania, they synthesised a range of alternative practices. They drew from indigenous practices around the world to create a design system enabling more food to be produced, within more resilient ecosystems, minimising the amount of effort required.
Since its founding, permaculture has bloomed into a worldwide network of teachers and practitioners. Introduction to permaculture courses are widely available, and a vibrant network of experts, speakers and workshop leaders has emerged. This has opened up the movement to criticism as it is largely residents of the Global North making money from knowledge produced in the Global South, and, although Holmgren and Mollison were explicit about the indigenous origins of their work, many contemporary practitioners forget or neglect to cite these origins. All of this can be said to amount to a neocolonial form of cultural appropriation.
There are a few techniques that have become iconic of permaculture in practice. The preference for spirals and circles over square beds, the raised herb spiral creating many different microclimates, the keyhole raised bed and swales, and mounded ditches horizontal to a slope which help capture and store rainwater. Permaculture also tends to incorporate perennial plants into the growing system. These are plants like trees, shrubs, vines and berry bushes which live longer than one year. The incorporation of perennial plants means that the soil doesn’t need to be disturbed every year and reduces the amount of time required to sow new plants.
All of this finds its highest form in the ‘forest garden’. As Max Paschall traces, the forest garden is an ancient method of stewarding land for abundant food production. In its modern iterations, it involves thinking of the garden in seven vertical layers: from the top down you have the canopy, with a dwarf fruit or nut tree understory, followed by vines, shrubs, herbs, and finally mushrooms and annual vegetables on the lowest layer. As the brilliant Future Ecologies exploration of Native American forest gardens in North America observes, these sorts of ecosystems mimic the natural succession of landscapes into a forest and as a result are incredibly resilient. 150 years without any direct stewardship and the temperate food forest they explore is still thriving.
Agroforestry
Food forests and permaculture have a lot in common with another burgeoning farming movement: agroforestry. With similar aims and ambitions agroforestry seeks to expand the scale of a forest garden, weaving trees with other forms of agriculture, especially livestock.
In the UK, the persistence of hedgerows is arguably the most mainstream form of agroforestry (5). The Agroforestry Research Trust has formed a network of projects implementing agroforestry. The practice survives on much larger scales in other parts of Europe however. In southwest Spain and parts of Portugal, the Dehesa region comprises thousands of oaks and an enormous variety of cattle.
There are many arguments in favour of agroforestry systems, including carbon sequestration, controlling soil erosion, creating habitat for wildlife, reducing the need for artificial fertiliser, and a wider range of possible crops.
Final thoughts
A diversity of approaches to growing is a good thing, it shows the movement is alive and in a heated process of figuring out what’s needed. Each umbrella term or specific methodology represents slightly different priorities, histories and ambitions. Whichever we choose to align ourselves with will depend on who we are and what we care about. And ultimately, the garden doesn’t care all that much about what we call ourselves, but what we do.
References
- Bless A, Davila F, Plant R. A genealogy of sustainable agriculture narratives: implications for the transformative potential of regenerative agriculture. Agric Hum Values. Published online May 1, 2023. doi:10.1007/s10460-023-10444-4
- Rosset PM, Barbosa LP, Val V, McCune N. Critical Latin American agroecology as a regionalism from below. Globalizations. 2022;19(4):635-652. doi:10.1080/14747731.2021.1923353
- Cardwell E. Their agriculture, our agriculture: applying critical Latin American agroecological thought to England/Sua agricultura, nossa agricultura: aplicando o pensamento agroecológico crítico da América Latina à Inglaterra/Su agricultura, nuestra agricultura: aplicando el pensamiento agroecológico crítico latinoamericano a Inglaterra. REVISTA NERA. 2022;25(64).
- Chalker-Scott L. The Science Behind Biodynamic Preparations: A Literature Review. HortTechnology. 2013;23:814-819. doi:10.21273/HORTTECH.23.6.814
- Tilzey M. The Political Ecology of Hedgerows and Their Relationship to Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in the UK. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. 2021;5. Accessed June 23, 2023. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2021.752293
- Schwartz C. Agroecology | A Tale of Two Continents | ARC2020. Agricultural and Rural Convention. Published February 16, 2021. https://www.arc2020.eu/agroecology-tale-two-continents/#:~:text=In%20Europe%20and%20the%20US,an%20exchange%20between%20the%20disciplines.
- What is agroecology? | Soil Association. https://www.soilassociation.org/causes-campaigns/a-ten-year-transition-to-agroecology/what-is-agroecology/?gclid=CjwKCAjwtuOlBhBREiwA7agf1lTM6epEpPCvA-MUHzzZGhYSJ7hmMmnEJpO-5Jvtk_gkB4cOHZbmmBoCxFQQAvD_BwE
