What is regenerative farming, and Why is biodiversity important to an ecosystem? In this excerpt, Vandana Shiva answers these questions and explains how agroecology methods improve the health of people and soil.
The industrial agriculture model has been promoted with the justification that it’s the only answer to food security. However, globally, billions of people face food insecurity. Further, because of industrial agriculture, 3 billion people suffer from chronic diseases.
Pesticide-free organic farming has thus emerged as a health imperative, and it contributes to nutrition, food, and health security. Over 30 years, Indian NGO Navdanya’s research has shown that we can produce more nutrition per acre through biodiversity, which in turn regenerates soil and promotes health.
Health Per Acre: Why Is Biodiversity Important?
Organic biodiversity-based mixed cropping is the foundation of health per acre, a system of farming that increases the nutrition produced per acre of farmland. The health-per-acre system promotes growing and consuming a wide variety of traditional local foods that inherently contain the entire profile of nutrients required by the human body. Organic mixed-cropping methods maximize the nutrition produced per acre and thus help avoid inflation of food items and the huge costs of transportation and storage.
This approach focuses more on the root causes of undernutrition rather than on the treatment alone. Undernutrition can’t be eradicated until we make an adequate quantity of a variety of food sustainably available to the target population.
Focusing on the nutrition produced per acre provides insight into the impact the organic mixed-cropping method can have on health. Until now, we’ve focused primarily on the yield per acre, which assumes that maximizing the yield of specific food items will solve undernutrition. However, a few food commodities produced in large quantities isn’t an answer to malnutrition. Most agricultural commodities go to biofuel and animal feed. The fraction used as food can’t ensure the diversity of nutrients needed for health. To ensure proper nutrition, we need dietary diversification, and to ensure dietary diversification, we need to diversify our farmlands.
When used as a measure of effectiveness, the yield per acre of monoculture agriculture appears to favor conventional monocropping. However, when we change the metric to nutrition produced per acre and compare these two systems, strikingly different results emerge. Diversity produces more nutrition and health per acre. Monocultures produce more commodities that harm health, both through nutritional deficiency and through the presence of toxins.
What Is Regenerative Farming?
Organic biodiversity-based mixed cropping is sustainable, time-tested, intelligent, cost-effective, and an ecological solution to the problem of malnutrition. The evidence is clear: More biodiversity equals higher nutrition per acre. The low productivity of industrial agriculture is hidden through reductionism: Industrial growing isn’t typically compared with agroecological growing. Instead, modern plant-breeding concepts, like high-yielding varieties (HYVs), reduce farming systems to individual crops and parts of crops. Crop components of one system are then measured against components of another. Since the Green Revolution strategy has been aimed at increasing the output of a single component — at the cost of decreasing other components and increasing external inputs — this partial comparison is biased to make the new varieties “high-yielding,” even when, at the systems level, they may not be.
Traditional farming systems are based on mixed and rotational cropping systems of cereals, pulses, and oilseeds — with diverse varieties of each crop — while the Green Revolution package is based on genetically uniform monocultures. No realistic assessments are ever made of the yield of the diverse crop outputs in the mixed and rotational systems. Usually, the yield of a single crop, like wheat or maize, is singled out and compared with yields of new varieties. Even if the yields of all the crops were included, it’s difficult to convert a measure of pulse into an equivalent measure of wheat, for example, because in the diet and in the ecosystem, they have distinctive functions. The protein value of pulses and the calorie value of cereals are both essential for a balanced diet, but in different ways, and one can’t replace the other. Similarly, the nitrogen-fixing capacity of pulses is an invisible ecological contribution to the yield of associated cereals.
The complex and diverse cropping systems based on native varieties are therefore not easy to compare with the simplified monocultures of HYV seeds. Such a comparison has to involve entire systems and can’t be reduced to a comparison of a fragment of the farm system.
In traditional farming systems, production has also involved maintaining the conditions of productivity.
The measurement of yields and productivity in the Green Revolution paradigm is divorced from seeing how the processes of increasing output affect the conditions that sustain agricultural production. While these reductionist categories of yield and productivity allow a higher measurement of partial yields, they exclude the measurement of the ecological destruction that affects future yields.
Toward a Biodiversity-Based Productivity Framework
Why is biodiversity important to an ecosystem? According to the dominant paradigm of production, diversity goes against productivity, which creates an imperative for uniformity and monocultures. This has generated the paradoxical situation in which modern plant improvement has been based on the destruction of the biodiversity it uses as raw material. In agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and animal husbandry, production is being incessantly pushed in the direction of diversity destruction. Production based on uniformity thus becomes the primary threat to biodiversity conservation and to sustainability, in both its natural resource and its socioeconomic dimensions.
Not until diversity is made the logic of production can diversity be conserved. If production continues to be based on the logic of uniformity and homogenization, uniformity will continue to displace diversity. There’s no inevitability that production should act against diversity. Uniformity becomes inevitable only in a context of control and profitability.
Plant improvement in agriculture has been based on the “enhancement” of the yield of the desired product at the expense of unwanted plant parts. But which parts of a farming system will be treated as “unwanted” depends on what class and what gender one belongs to. What’s unwanted for agribusiness may be wanted by the poor, and, by squeezing out those aspects of biodiversity, agricultural “development” fosters poverty and ecological decline.
Overall productivity and sustainability is much higher in mixed systems of farming and forestry that produce diverse outputs. Productivity of monocultures is low in the context of diverse outputs and needs. These high partial yields don’t translate into high total (including diverse) yields. Productivity is therefore different depending on whether it’s measured in a framework of diversity or uniformity.
In the context of climate change, the relevant metric is climate resilience. The so-called HYVs are low-yielding in droughts, floods, and cyclones and are vulnerable to total crop failure. Their yield falls to zero. Traditional varieties bred for salt resistance, flood resistance, and drought resistance have climate resilience. Diverse native varieties are often as high-yielding or more so than industrially bred varieties.
Navdanya, a national seed and biodiversity conservation program and organic agriculture movement in India, has assessed comparative yields of native and Green Revolution varieties in farmers’ fields. Green Revolution varieties aren’t higher-yielding under the conditions of low capital availability and fragile ecosystems. Farmers’ varieties aren’t intrinsically low-yielding, and industrial varieties aren’t intrinsically high-yielding. Industrial methods also replace internal inputs provided by biodiversity with hazardous agrichemicals. Productivity in traditional practices has always been high if we remember they require few external inputs.
Thinking of the soil as an empty container; of plants as machines that run on chemical fertilizers as fuel; of pests as “enemies” to be exterminated; of food as matter to stuff ourselves with; and of our bodies as machines that need fixing externally when they break down, is at the root of the multiple crises of agriculture, food, and health that we face. The destruction of the Earth and her diversity, along with the destruction of diverse cultures and rich knowledge systems by the mechanical mind, has left the Earth and humanity impoverished and more ignorant.
We need to make a paradigm shift from the violence of mechanistic reductionism inherent to industrial agriculture, industrial food, and industrial medicine to the biodiversity-centered, ecological, and nutritionally sensitive paradigms of agriculture, food, nutrition, and health.
Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecologist, and advocate of biodiversity conservation and farmers’ rights. Her work around food sovereignty, traditional agriculture, and women’s rights has fundamentally shifted how the world views these issues. This excerpt is from her book Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture (Synergetic Press).
Originally published as “Agroecology and Regenerative Agriculture” in the June/July 2023 issue of MOTHER EARTH NEWS and regularly vetted for accuracy.
