Ecoagriculture for a Sustainable Food Future

By Nicole Y. Chalmer

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781486313433

Nicole Y. Chalmer

Nicole Chalmer gained a Bachelor of Science and Graduate Diploma in Agribusiness before going farming for 30 years. She partnered in developing Coronet Hill at Esperance using ecological principles and perennial pastures for cattle production. Discontent concerning the social-ecological sustainability of modern farming led her to complete an environmental history PhD analysing sustainability of food production systems, from the deep past, colonialism and present.

Book preview

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, Earth is a life-giving planet, the result of a long history of interactions between biology and geophysical processes. Living organisms fundamentally transformed the planet with a massive biodiversity explosion when they started to photosynthesise using carbon dioxide and the sun’s energy for food; oxygen was produced as a waste product.⁷ We as Homo sapiens, our relatives and ancestors have been very recent newcomers to the history of life on Earth. Nevertheless, our effects on planetary ecological systems and climate have been disproportionate, starting at least 500 000 years ago, when Homo erectus began using fire to manipulate landscapes.⁸ New evidence points to rapidly increasing human influence, including on global climate, when humans started to farm in settlements around 8000–10 000 years ago. Most researchers now agree that humans have had environmental impacts almost everywhere on the Earth’s surface.⁹,¹⁰ In today’s overpopulated world, human–environment interactions at nature’s expense have become so accepted and transforming as to put at risk the functioning of the ecosystems necessary to support not only the needs of other life forms but also humanity.

It is important to understand some key ecological concepts, such as sustainable versus unsustainable practices, when investigating the culture and ecology of food producing systems. These concepts recognise that though there are few natural untouched systems without people (or their indirect effects), social systems cannot exist without nature. Though this seems to be common sense, for a long time after its inception ecological theory and principles were developed as though nature existed free of human influences. Ecological geographers Ian Davidson-Hunt and Fikret Berkes from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and other researchers, were among the first to show how traditionally human social and ecological systems are deeply interconnected and co-evolving across space and time scales. They are clear that this paradigm accepts ‘the evolutionary or adaptive relationships between human societies and nature where humans and their societies are part of ecological systems within a defined boundary, neither people nor nature having pre-eminence’.¹¹ To merge these relationships, they conclude that people live in social ecological systems (SES), and I use this concept as the guideline throughout this book.¹¹ I take the SES concept even further by including non-human animals as socially and culturally organised and therefore having SES, because they are part of and profoundly influence ecological systems.

The ability to adapt to change and the paths taken in adaptation can influence the long-term sustainability of human SES. In using sustainability in this context throughout this book, I am referring to the ability of a food production system to exist and adapt in the long term (1000 years and more) without doing irreparable damage to the ability of co-evolving ecosystem structures and functions to support it. This is not an unachievable idea. In the past, traditional intensive and permanent Chinese food production systems lasted for at least 4000 years (until industrialisation) as food and human waste nutrients from cities were exhaustively returned to farms.¹²

Food culture anthropologist Eugene Anderson has spent his professional life studying human food culture. He reiterates that the easy availability and abundance of food choices is too often taken for granted in modern societies such as Australia. We seem to ignore the reality that food is a fundamental prerequisite for survival and contentment at both the scale of individuals and of societies at large. What people recognise as food is culturally based (and even class based within a society), meaning that potential foods in new places may not be recognised, especially by invading cultures. These influences on production and consumption of food are so important that people will take their culturally based and often environmentally inappropriate foods and associated production systems with them when they invade new lands.¹³ The type of agro-ecosystems that then develops reflects this culturally acceptable food, and can have disastrous consequences for the Indigenous SES and the ecosystems they displace. Indigenous societies, including Aboriginal Australians, had far better nutrition, based on nutrient dense varieties of plant and animal foods, than do agricultural societies that sacrificed quality for bulk starch foods mostly based on cereal grains.

Ecosystems that are re-organised for human food production purposes are essentially domesticated ecosystems which channel most of the energy produced into human food through various interventions such as use of fire, plant cultivation and animal production. They can range from highly complex biodiverse systems in which a wide range of plant and animal foods are exploited (traditional Aboriginal food systems are an example) to highly simplified ecosystems growing very few types of food (modern agricultural monocultures). Agroecologist Miguel Altieri explains that food producing systems may be considered comparatively sustainable and resilient when they maintain many important elements of their surrounding ‘natural’ ecosystem processes, such as recycling of manures and minerals, and maintenance of hydrology, along with environmental social responsibility, and cultural and economic viability.¹⁴

As part of the process of transforming nature to produce food, cultures are organised in terms of social relationships including religions, gender roles and seasonal rhythms, as well as in their basic interactions with and beliefs about nature. A community that makes its living from hunting, gathering and managing numerous resources is likely to have a different set of cultural expertise from an agricultural community that relies on relatively few plant and animal species, and will differ greatly from those raised in urban communities.¹⁵ People in the first type of community will have sophisticated and wide ranging knowledge about their environment’s interrelationships and food producing systems and their role within it. Those in the second will have knowledge about how best to produce from their few species in the vastly changed local environment, but may be quite ignorant of surrounding ecological systems, the ecosystem services they provide and the effects their agricultural practices have upon those ecosystems. Those in the third, who live in an artificial human construct world, may be exceptionally ignorant about the processes of nature they rely upon to eat, drink and breathe.

There is much to be learnt from traditional food production systems that have demonstrated their sustainability by persisting for thousands of years. Such systems are based on integrated cultural, agroecological and social principles that are not subsumed by the prevailing view that nature, culture and food are only valuable in monetary terms, as part of economic resources for a market economy. British Professor of Agro-ecology Jules Pretty has compared and contrasted traditional agricultural societies throughout Africa and western industrialised agricultural systems, for many years.¹⁶ Key parameters were input types and quantities, the role of non-agricultural nature, and social and cultural qualities that internalise rather than externalise ecological consequences of human activity. He concludes that industrialised agricultural systems erode natural and cultural capital. Linked factors such as ‘continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the signals of climate change are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards and beyond critical thresholds.’¹⁶ His stance is that industrialised food systems cannot be sustainable or able to maintain long-term world food production and security unless they incorporate the vital aspects of traditional systems, to develop new ways of producing food and even organising society. A small and positive example of how this can work is described by agro-ecologist Alfonso Castro, who discussed how in Kirinyaga, Kenya, the Ndia and Gichugu Kikuyu people’s traditional communal agroforestry practices sustainably maintained multi-use food producing forests within their SES for generations. Colonial invasion and the consequent disruptions caused by privatisation of land tenure and other ‘innovations’, such as the cash crop food economy which grows food to export rather than to feed local people, prevented the continuation of traditional communal forestry. The replacement state-run agroforestry concentrates on introduced commercial monocultures but allowed traditional food forestry to continue in the commercial forests. Though inadequate when compared to the past, this does provide a degree of food security for the rural population.¹⁷

Aboriginal SES in the Esperance bioregion include the Nyungar and Ngadju peoples. In an Australian context, they exemplify some of the longest continuous systems of adaptive and resilient human environmental management to produce food, with archaeological and cultural evidence going back at least 15 000–20 000 years.¹⁸,¹⁹ Though Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) is slowly being recognised in Australia as important in environmental management for conservation, there is an ongoing and persistent failure to recognise that TEK systems actually managed SES within a food production framework, rather than aligning with modern conservation’s aesthetic, endangered species and biodiversity aims.²⁰ Acknowledging that Aboriginal SES could provide information that is usable in the development of good social and ecological relationships for food production in Australia is generally not considered among producers, agricultural researchers and policy makers; rather, they are sure that modern systems are better.

Resilience, sustainability and change

There are numerous interpretations and definitions of sustainability, depending upon the context in which it is used, but we cannot take seriously any that do not recognise that the environment, its ecosystems and social systems should be regarded as interdependent. Australian ecologists Chris Cocklin and Jacqui Dibden note, ‘sustainability … is an ambiguous and contested concept.’²¹ It surely is, for very often it is used in the context of a definition of sustainable development. ‘Sustainable development’ was defined by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 (the Brundtland Commission) as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’²² A wide range of nations adopted this view, including the Australian federal government, which adapted it to produce a National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development.²³,ii

An unrecognised problem with ‘development’ is that it invariably means rapid environmental change for species and ecosystems. This can be coped with by those preadapted for rapid change, but for most it means obliteration. When bushlands are cleared for farms or suburbs, the ecosystems and habitats they contain are gone. This type of development can never be considered sustainable for the ecosystems and species involved. In such cases, the use of ‘sustainable’ and ‘development’ in the same paragraph is an oxymoron – it assumes that continuous rapid economic–biophysical growth and change in a finite world is possible without serious consequences for ecosystems.²⁴ An alternative view of sustainability would encompass circular systems of resource and energy use that give life the chance to continue evolving in all its self -sustaining complexity and adaptability, despite change.

Sustainability in food production is therefore a continual process rather than an end point. It includes ecological, cultural and economic dimensions that interact with agricultural systems to produce long-term systems. Ecologist John Ikerd proposes that ‘a sustainable agriculture can maintain its productivity and usefulness to society indefinitely’ by using ‘farming systems that conserve resources, protect the environment, produce efficiently, compete commercially, and enhance the quality of life for farmers and society.’²⁵ Charles Holling, Fikret Berkes, Carl Folke and co-researchers propose that resilience is the dynamic development of complex adaptive systems that interact across time and space. It is the key to sustainability because resilient SES have the capacity to adapt and withstand disturbances or, by changing and transforming into new states of being, can maintain their functionality.²⁶,²⁷ However they can also be transformed for the worse (in terms of food production and biodiversity) under bad management and become resilient in their new ugly state, and difficult or impossible to regenerate.

This concept of system resilience has been applied to the Western Australian wheatbelt by ecologists Helen Allison and Richard Hobbs, who have looked at the dynamics of that region in terms of long-term sustainability and resilience to change.²⁸ Though this region superficially appears to be an economically adaptive system, having survived several cycles of economic fluctuations, this view fails to account for growing environmental problems such as topsoil loss and deeper physical and biological degradation; environmental pollution with cropping chemicals; accelerating and spreading hydrological imbalance and salinity; loss of biodiversity; and social factors such as population decline in country towns. Such an array of issues signifies that the wheatbelt SES is not sustainable in the long term. It is in a ‘lock-in pathological trap’ that is exceedingly difficult to address at the individual and landscape scales, given the economic and social rigidity of our society. The Esperance bioregion landscape was one of the last areas of Western Australia to be transformed from a landscape dominated by the perennial vegetation of trees and native bush into a virtually treeless landscape devoted to large-scale prairie-like livestock farms and annual cropping monocultures. Allison and Hobbs’ conclusions are a prediction of a future trajectory that this later developed region will have to attend to, as similar environmental and social issues are already appearing.

Evidence is growing about past dramatic climatic fluctuations that would be a threat to modern food production systems that rely on climatic stability. Louise Cullen and Pauline Grierson from the University of Western Australia reconstructed the climate history of the Western Australian south-eastern coast using tree growth rings from Callitris species, a small cypress conifer that grows on salt lake margins. Results showed long periods in the past where food production would not have been easy even for adaptive Aboriginal SES, as rainfall cycles included up to 30 years of aridity followed by around 15 years of good rainfall. If such conditions reappear in the present, they will be disastrous for our modern agriculture SES and the food security it represents.²⁹

Rangeland researcher R.R. McAllister and others have analysed pastoralism throughout Australian rangelands.³⁰ They conclude that the way that most pastoralism is conducted exhibits extreme fragility and is unlikely to survive unless there are changes into new systems. The issues become especially obvious during droughts. They are rarely dealt with in an adaptive and timely manner (destocking or rotational grazing), and perennial grasses and other palatable bush vegetation are overgrazed. Whole regions become bared soil semi-deserts that then influence the local climate and hydrology, furthering the continuation of drought conditions. When rain eventually comes, additional damage is done as flooding scours away the bared topsoils and further erodes the landscape. This means that edible perennial plants can no longer become established, and salinity increases. And so, the degradation cycle continues deeper and deeper towards desertification.

In properly managed systems there are long periods of rest from grazing pressure, with rotations so that palatable perennial plants can recover and reduce the domination of annual grasses (which require consistent rainfall to germinate) and unpalatable shrubs. New evidence using a historical research approach along with field studies indicates that removing dingoes (Canis dingo) from pastoral lands removes control of smaller predators such as foxes and cats, and significantly contributes to the domination of unpalatable shrubs. These smaller predators prey upon the small herbivore species that eat inedible shrub seeds, and reduce their numbers. This allows an eruption of shrub seed germination at the expense of palatable perennial plants.³¹ These new findings further illustrate how important it is to take a broad, whole-of-ecosystem approach to human interactions with nature. Too often, vast and harsh efforts are employed to control and eliminate individual species. This approach rarely succeeds but, if left alone with an apex predator or predators, the ecosystem sorts itself out.

Why are histories and baselines of food, culture and nature important?

Discovering the eco-environmental history of a region or place is vital, and should be mandatory before long-term plans are made on how to manage or farm it. If only short time scales are used to try and understand how the present situations have been arrived at, mistakes are inevitable. People most often believe that they live in unchanging environmental landscapes, not comprehending that their everyday activities can have profound impacts upon ecosystems, landscapes and climate in both the short