Decentralization ~ Food Independence

It is no surprise that America has transitioned from an agrarian to an urban nation. Today, very few Americans possess any food-growing skills, with less than 10% of Americans having experienced the joy of gardening and harvesting their food on a household scale. We depend on Big Agro to produce our food commodities, and then on the transportation infrastructure, and then on trucks that deliver the food to our supermarkets. The closer we are from food-to-table, the closer our relationship with Earth and our health. The ancestral memory of our agrarian relationship with seeds, soil, land, and harvest is but a forgotten memory in the urban psyche. We have lost this precious connection with foraging and harvesting, which is a gift from God. Instead, we work mindlessly to pay for food that is forced-fed to us by corporations. Food that is grown in depleted soils, void of valuable nutrients. A good amount of our food is now GMO and contaminated with PFAS’s and other poisons. It is no surprise that our nation is 1st in the world in obesity and Diabetes; it is no surprise that our life expectancy has been shortened by 10 years, and these are just 2 symptoms of a very sick nation.

Society must depend less on mono-crop toxic agriculture and move towards a society of gardeners and horticulturists. Replacing extensive mono-culture agro-industry with a perennial model of food production. Every single human society that has relied on annual crops for staple food has collapsed. Our Western narrative of conquering and treating nature as our enemy in our conquest for raw materials needs to change. We live within a constraint system that has bio-physical limitations. We are a part of Earth's nature, not aliens hitching a ride; this is frankly all we got, so it behooves us to work with nature as our bosom.

The chemical manifold of interconnecting systems or web of life is a recursive system where all gets recycled, where everything feeds something else, and where nothing is left to waste. Nature, short for web of life, is organized on the molecular level in ways we only begin to understand. We do know that the cell is a sophisticated multi-organelle system capable of multiplying chemical exchanges with purposeful design. Part of this design is that it feeds itself.

Our foraging ancestors and the first agricultural settlers intuited this design and followed nature's leadership, following its seasonal attributes and celebrating its bountiful gifts. Nature has been our teacher with its proven wisdom to integrate diverse, resilient, stable, and productive natural ecosystems. Nature self-heals and efficiently reshuffles resources in this self-sufficient system. An example that replicates these systems is the Chinese rice farmers who have retained and enriched soil for thousands of years in sloping lands with terracing rice-paddy techniques.

Another similar system was developed by Rudolf Steiner in 1924. He tagged it biodynamic agriculture, which is a holistic system that treats the farm as an organism. The goal is a closed loop, where no inputs are brought onto the farm. Soil fertility is built through cover crops and on-farm animal manure. A similar strategy is Masanobu Fukuoka's “natural farming” methods, which leave most of the variables to nature itself, and the rest is in cooperation with the natural environment.

Another discipline that is inspired by nature is Permaculture. The word Permaculture comes from permanent and culture. It is a philosophical approach to land practices with conscious ethical care for the earth and people. Permaculture includes the 3,000 varieties of edible species, vegetables, and fruits developed by agrarian societies for millennia. Permaculture creates systems with concern for microclimates, protecting waterways, soil management, and terraforming tree-guilds and companion plants; annuals and perennials in symbiosis with animals, insects, and microorganisms invigorating these life cycles. These perennial systems mimic nature and generate abundance. Examples of such systems are food forests, edible gardens, bio-intensive gardening, natural farming, horticulture, vertical gardens, roof gardens, container farming, and hydroponics. These practices are all options that are changing our approach to food production.

From kitchen counter top sprouting to bio-intensive agriculture, we have never had so many options to take control of what we eat, supplementing and optimizing our odds at food independence. Thousands of green thumb activists are rekindling their relationship with the earth, soil, and its gifts. The riches of a mature nature-inspired orchard will ultimately keep us alive and healthy. We must be proper stewards of this gift.