- A New Vision for Iowa Food and Agriculture, Food, Energy, and Agriculture Commentary
- September 11, 2010
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The Information Age: The Path toward Ecological Crop and Livestock Production
by Francis Thicke[The following is an excerpt taken from my book, 'A New Vision for Iowa Food and Agriculture'.]
Chapter 2. The Information Age: The Path toward Ecological Crop and Livestock Production.
The wave of industrialization that ushered animals into CAFOs in industrialized countries didn’t begin in earnest until the latter part of the 20th Century. This is the same timeframe within which modern society began its transition out of the Industrial Age and into the Information Age. That means that CAFOs – the epitome of industrial livestock production – came into vogue just in time to be obsolete, just as society was transitioning from an industrial mode to knowledge-based systems.
What does the Information Age mean for agriculture? It means a vast expansion of scientific knowledge about plants, animals and soils – and the web of connections and interactions among them. In short, the Information Age is bringing agriculture a deeper understanding of nature’s ecology. Armed with this deeper knowledge of the ecology of crops, soils, weeds, insects and other pathogens, we are now in a position to design and manage crop and livestock systems that mimic the functions of natural ecologies. By using ecology as a model, we can strategically use crop rotations, beneficial insects, cover crops, nitrogen-fixing crops, managed grazing and other practices to circumvent the need for herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers and fossil-fuel energy. This ecology-based approach to agriculture will help us protect and improve soil quality, water quality, air quality and wildlife habitat. A good example of an ecologically designed animal production system is a grass-based dairy farm, which will be explored in detail below.
Wikipedia describes the transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age as “a shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based around the manipulation of information.” For livestock production, that shift means a shift from industrial CAFO-style systems to production systems that use information to harness the efficiency, energy, and organizing power of nature’s ecology in the design and management of animal production systems.
It is important to distinguish between holistic uses of information – in which the many interactions of the parts of a system and the system’s effect on its external environment are taken into account – and a reductionist approach to information. Reductionism refers to the theory that a complex system can be fully understood by understanding the components of the system. In a reductionist approach, the functions of the parts of a system are optimized but less consideration is given to the holistic function of the system and the system’s effect on the surrounding environment.
For example, the design and management of animal confinement systems are certainly based on a lot of technical information, such as the mechanics of how to house and feed as many animals as possible in as little space as possible, and how to use pharmaceuticals to overcome disease pressures in closely confined animals. That reductionist approach, however, ignores the holistic understanding of natural animal behaviors that are thwarted by close confinement and the health problems that may be caused or aggravated by such close confinement. A more holistic, or ecological, approach to animal husbandry takes into account that animals can be healthier – and fewer pharmaceuticals may be needed – if animals are less crowded and in a more natural environment.
The differences between reductionist and holistic applications of information can also be seen in crop production systems. For example, a reductionist approach reveals that high yields and profits may be obtained by continuously growing annual crops (such as corn and soybeans) using high fertilizer rates, and tile drainage systems under the soil to remove excess water. However, that ignores the holistic (ecological) understanding that such a system inherently leaks nitrate into water resources and is prone to excessive soil erosion.
The reductionist attempt to solve the problem of soil erosion in annual crop production is to build more terraces and other mechanical structures to try to slow down water runoff in order to reduce its erosive power. The reductionist approach to solving the problem of nitrate leaching from the soil in annual crop production is to build artificial wetlands below tile drainage lines to try to remove the leached nitrate from the water before it gets into the river. A holistic, or ecological, solution to both soil erosion and nitrate leaching is to use more cover and perennial crops in the crop rotation, which reduces both soil erosion and nitrate leaching.
Genetic engineering of crops also tends to follow a reductionist approach. Engineering a crop to be able to withstand the herbicide glyphosate – which will kill all other plants – produces good weed control (at least initially). However, unintended consequences of this reductionist approach to weed control include the evolution of weeds that become resistant to glyphosate,iii concerns about glyphosate toxicity for non-target species such as amphibians,iv human health concerns about genetically modified foods, and unintended effects of glyphosate on soil microbiology and crop performance.
An example of a more holistic, ecological approach to weed control is some promising new research on the use of cover crops for weed control. In this system, a cover crop is planted in the fall and the following spring the cover crop is flattened and killed with a roller/crimper tool. A crop is then planted into the rolled-down residue. The cover crop residue keeps weeds from growing, helps retain soil moisture, feeds soil microorganisms and contributes to carbon sequestration in the soil.
For agriculture, the Information Age should be called the Age of Ecology or the Knowledge Age, where knowledge refers to holistic, integrated use of information.
Another harbinger of the coming transition to ecologically based agricultural systems is the escalating cost of fossil-fuel energy. Energy costs are a growing burden for industrial agriculture. The industrial system of agriculture we have today could not have developed without cheap fossil-fuel energy, and it will not likely be able to survive the prohibitively expensive fossil fuels of tomorrow.
The end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era in agriculture presents us with two choices: to change our agricultural systems through foresight, planning and design, or to be forced to change by default when agriculture gets priced out of the fossil-fuel market. If we wait until agriculture is priced out of the fossil-fuel market before beginning to transition to a post-fossil-fuel agriculture, we will undoubtedly experience chaos and hardship, and possibly food shortages. The sudden oil price spike of 2008 was a lesson in how quickly and unexpectedly high oil prices can rise. If oil economist Jeff Rubin is right, the future will bring us a roller coaster of oil-price ups and downs, with increasingly higher price spikes.
The coming transition to an agriculture that is not dependent on fossil fuels presents an opportunity to recreate our agriculture so it becomes more profitable for family farmers, supports thriving rural communities, and better protects the environment.
[Stay tuned to this blog: I will be posting all the chapters from my book, 'A New Vision For Iowa Food And Agriculture' to this blog during the final weeks before the election on November 2nd. I look forward to any comments or questions you have.]
