The future of agriculture
The future of agriculture
From 2020 to date, a group of researchers consisting of myself (formerly UNIPA), Giovanni Dara Guccione (CREA), Barbara Manachini (UNIPA), Paola Quatrini (UNIPA) and Alberto Sturla (CREA) have worked tirelessly on an agroecology text (which will be in bookstores starting in autumn 2024), consisting of approximately 500 pages, accompanied by images, concrete examples, field tests, experiences, etc.
The Italian climatologist and science communicator Luca Mercalli also joined this group and, with his valuable preface, analyzed the agroecological vision in perspective with its connections between humanity and nature.
The book is supported by a large bibliography of almost 600 research and publications consulted all over the world.
A demanding, painstaking work, which ranges from the energetic-ecological vision of natural and agricultural ecosystems, to the quantitative and qualitative implications and the substantial differences between conventional agriculture and agroecology and the necessary global policies to promote what the FAO itself hopes for as a “necessary transition”.
For the first time, an overview is provided between the discoveries of thermodynamic and quantum sciences, which probe the complexity of our reality, and the links with the complexity of ecological systems, dissecting an unequivocal logic that indicates what the consequent behaviors to adopt should be.
Going into the specifics of agricultural facts, it emerges that in the last decades of human history we have produced food and other services with great expenditure of energy and, therefore, with low energy and production efficiency, contradicting the common belief (scientifically incorrect) that specialized agriculture is the one that produces the most and can feed the world. Nothing could be more incorrect from a scientific, technical and ethical point of view.
Science tells us the complete opposite.
It tells us that a transition is needed towards completely different models of organization of society (and therefore of agriculture) where the “cultivation” of biodiversity and complementarity goes against the anti-economic and anti-ecological rules of liberalism and capitalism.
It emerges that Nature does not work like this and that its rules, based on the laws of physics, are universal, they apply to all living beings, including the human species. Not even the economy can alienate itself from them.
In a progression of information that, from the most theoretical, gradually gives shape to the most applicative, we thus arrive at the techniques to be implemented to demonstrate, finally, how infinite economic growth (both at the small company and macrosystem level) is not only economically unsustainable, but also physically impossible. Obviously there is an alternative path, which in fact has always been written in the Codes of Nature.
The text, in fact, by addressing the divergence and dichotomy between the complexity of natural ecosystems and the relative simplicity of today’s agricultural systems (often monoculture) highlights, with unequivocal data, a series of issues:
1. Today’s agriculture (let’s say the post-Green Revolution one) has a low production efficiency if, related, to the productivity of natural systems and (in the agricultural field) agroecological;
2. Current agricultural techniques are energetically inefficient and ecologically impactful (progressive loss of fertility, biodiversity, etc.);
3. These techniques increasingly require (precisely because they are outside the codes of nature) an increasingly intense use of external inputs (herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, etc.) which, coincidentally, are peddled by multinationals as fundamental factors for agricultural yields.
4. The effects of current production systems and the organization of large-scale distribution have made farmers’ income increasingly low (who are now unable to support themselves even with CAP aid);
5. Wherever visions (and therefore agroecological research and techniques) have been implemented, we are witnessing a gradual but constant recovery of the beneficial effects on human ecosystems (profitability, better living and working conditions, less need for external inputs, such as fertilizers, herbicides, etc.) and on natural ecosystems (improved soil fertility, increased cultivated and natural biodiversity, quality of soil, water and air, etc.)
6. Etc.
Obviously, the approximately 500 pages contain many scientific, technical, ethical elements, concrete experiences of companies that have been making the agroecological transition for years, and the necessary national and international policies that will have to be implemented to allow it.
A real technical-cultural manual that, once finished reading, completely changes our approach and our vision of agricultural things (and not only).
It emerges that there is already a path that is evolving among the ruins of an ancient way of understanding the economy and social justice but that we need ethical, scientific, technical and social tools that are completely different from those we have used in recent decades.
To put it like A. Einstein “We cannot solve problems with the same type of thinking that we used when we created them.” This obviously also applies to the times and methods for making this change. We must return to the rhythms of Nature.
Guido Bissanti