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All the while they will be tracking changes in the communities and looking for rules and patterns about how stable communities assemble. Within a few growing seasons, they want their target perennial grains to be well represented, and to yield abundantly year after year without weeding or seeding. If a few other noncrop species are present in the mix, so be it. Then you sit back and watch the trajectory unfold.

The trajectory might take five years, say, but you would be rewarded with a complex, persistent system. The resultant recipe might include a recommendation to burn in year two, mow in year three, or graze livestock in year four. Your best hedge against disaster is going to be variety, just as the prairie teaches—lots of paints in your palette so that no matter what the conditions, some species will still flourish. It has to compete reasonably well with what farmers are now growing.

The final three questions that occupy Piper and company have to do with the polyculture performance from that pragmatic point of view. Can the polyculture yields stay even with or actually overyield those of monocultures?

Nor are they competing for the same plane of sunshine. As a result, the members of a diverse community are actually capturing more resources and yielding more than they would under constant same-species competition. The literature is replete with examples of overyielding when complementary annuals such as maize, beans, and squash are planted together.

When compared with their performances in monoculture, plants in mixtures have consistently overyielded. It makes sense if you think about it. An insect that finds itself in a field of nothing but its target plant is like a burglar with the key to every house in the neighborhood. In a polyculture, where all the locks are different, finding food is more of a chore. A mixed neighborhood is equally frustrating for diseases that specialize in one plant. A fungus may fester on an individual, but when it releases its spores, the leaves of invulnerable plants act as a flypaper, bringing the fungal rampage to a halt.

Invasions are contained. Just as with overyielding, most of the experimental evidence for resistance comes from studies on annual plants in polycultures. In , Cornell biologists Steve Risch, Dave Andow, and Miguel Altieri reviewed such studies and found that 53 percent of the insect pest species were less abundant in annual polycultures than in annual monocultures.

Similarly, Australian ecologist Jeremy Burdon summarized studies of two- component mixtures and found that there were always fewer diseased plants in the polyculture. So far, the same seems to hold true for the perennial polycultures planted at The Land. But only in the monocultures. The bundleflower that was grown with gamagrass was fine. Polycultures also seem to reduce or delay the onset of maize dwarf mosaic virus, which can be a problem on eastern gamagrass.

With the thought of pesticides gone, Piper and his colleagues began fantasizing about eliminating another petroleum-based crutch: nitrogen fertilizer. Can the polyculture sponsor its own nitrogen fertility?

The question of how much nitrogen fertilizer a domestic prairie would need has not been definitively answered as of this writing. So far, though, signs are pointing to little or none. Tiny balls on the roots of a legume such as Illinois bundleflower are home to bacteria that have the ability to turn atmospheric nitrogen into plant food.

As a result, legumes find a niche in nitrogen-poor soils, thriving where other plants falter. Plants growing near the self-sufficient legumes may also benefit from stored nitrates that return to the soil when the legume sheds a leaf, turns over a portion of its roots, or lays down its last.

In initial investigations of polycultures that include Illinois bundleflower, Piper found that, as predicted, bundleflower can grow beautifully and yield well even in poor soil, leaving the soil character actually improved.

Which is why, of course, no prairie would be without them. If the eroding Breadbasket is to be transformed by the work at The Land Institute, it will have sweeping repercussions. In the droughty plains, you want water hoarders. As the following stories will show, the investigation is already under way.

As he strolled along a rural road, he spotted a rice plant in a ditch, a volunteer growing not from a clean slate of soil but from a tangle of fallen rice stalks. He took it to be the whisper of a secret revealed to him. In early October, Fukuoka hand-sows clover seeds into his standing rice crop. Shortly after that, he sows seeds of rye and barley into the rice. When the rice is ready for harvest, he cuts it, threshes it, and then throws the straw back over the field.

By this time, clover is already well established, helping to smother weeds and fix nitrogen in the soil. Through the tangle of clover and straw, rye and barley burst up and begin their climb toward the sun.

On and on the cycle goes, self-fertilizing and self-cultivating. In this way rice and winter grains can be grown in the same field for many years without diminishing soil fertility. The neighboring farmers are curious. Whereas they spend their days cultivating, weeding, and fertilizing, Fukuoka lets the straw and clover do the work.

Instead of flooding his fields throughout the season, Fukuoka uses only a brief dousing of water to head off weed germination. After that he drains the fields and then worries about nothing, except an occasional mowing of the paths between fields. On a quarter acre, he will reap twenty-two bushels of rice and twenty-two bushels of winter grains. Natural farming has spread throughout Japan and is being used on about 1 million acres in China. The allure of this system is that the same piece of ground can be used without being used up, and yields can be consistently good.

Instead of working harder, he whittled away unnecessary agricultural practices one by one, asking what he could stop doing rather than what he could do. It throws scientific and traditional farming know-how right out the window. With this kind of farming, which uses no machines, no prepared fertilizer, and no chemicals, it is possible to attain a harvest equal to or greater than that of the average Japanese farm.

The proof is ripening right before your eyes. In permaculture, you ask not what you can wring from the land, but what the land has to offer. You roll with the weaknesses and the strengths of your acreage, and in this spirit of cooperation, says Mollison, the land yields generously without depletion and without inordinate amounts of body work from you.

The most laborious part of permaculture is designing the system to be self-supporting. The idea is to lay out crops so that those you visit most frequently are close by your dwelling Mollison calls it edible landscaping and those that require less vigilance are set out in concentric circles farther from the house.

Everywhere, there are plants in two-or three-canopy schemes, that is, shrubs shaded by small trees, which are shaded by larger trees.

Animals graze beneath all three canopies. Dips and furrows in the land are used to cache rainwater and to irrigate automatically. Wherever possible, permaculturists invite external forces such as wind or flooding to actually help do the work. They build windmills, for instance, or plant crops on floodplains, where they can enjoy a yearly pulse of alluvial sediment. To maximize these beneficial unions, the permaculturist creates a lot of edge—transition zones between two habitats that are notoriously full of life and interaction.

Mollison is also fond of using interactions between animals in place of high-energy inputs or machinery. They add to the heat with their own bodies, helping the plants survive the frosty dawns. In the morning, when the greenhouse becomes too hot, the chickens move into the forest for grazing.

As they search for nuts and acorns shed by the planted trees, they comb the ground like rakes, aerating and manuring the soil while snatching up tree pests. Humans eat the eggs and eventually the flesh of these chickens, but in the meantime, they enjoy their services as cultivators, pest controllers, greenhouse heaters, and self-fed fertilizers.

Mollison learned this ballet of efficiency firsthand when he worked in the forests of Australia in the late sixties. As a researcher, he was trained to describe the biological world and leave it at that. Today in Australia many farms are now working according to the permaculture principles he has popularized, and an international permaculture institute, with branches throughout the world, is training people to disseminate the technique.

They formed the New Alchemy Institute in to design living spaces and food producing systems that would use nature as a model. The forest-in-succession was the conceptual guide for their totally self-sustained farm. It then rises through the shrub layer to the canopy formed by the trees that produce fruit, nuts, timber, and fodder crops.

Wherever possible, the work of machines and, by extension, humans is replaced by the work of biological organisms or systems. The Javanese farm is nature in miniature, and it shows the restorative processes of planned succession. In early phases, annual crops and fish ponds might dominate the landscape, but as the landscape grows and matures, a third dimension develops as tree crops and livestock come into their own. The tropical forests here are paradises—cornucopias of irrepressible vegetation and edible foods ripening under a natural heat lamp and mister.

It makes sense if you realize that the same force that creates the jungle—deluges of rain—can also leach nutrients from unprotected jungle soil after clearing, when there are no plants around to soak up water. Crop harvests also remove even more nutrients from the site. After a few years of this nutrient extortion, the soil quickly tires. Natural clearings in the jungle meet an entirely different fate. They are quickly revegetated by a parade of species that take over one after another, sinking roots, spreading canopies, shedding leaves, and restoring fertility to the site.

Ewel, a botany professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, hypothesized that if you could simulate a natural regrowth of jungle using domestic crops as stand-ins for the wild species, you could achieve the same fertility-building phenomenon and actually improve the system rather than deplete it.

The trick is to start with crops that mimic the first successional stage grasses and legumes , and then add crops that mimic the next stage perennial shrubs , all the way up to the larger trees—nut crops, for instance.

To test their hypothesis, Jack Ewel and colleague Corey Berish cleared two plots in Costa Rica, letting them naturally reseed to jungle. In one of the plots, every time a jungle plant sprouted, they would dig it up and replace it with a human food crop that had the same physical form.

Annual for annual, herbaceous perennial for herbaceous perennial, tree for tree, vine for vine—it was as if nature were guiding the hands of the agronomists.

The parade of volunteers to the natural system Heliconia species, cucurbitaceous vines, Ipomoea species, legume vines, shrubs, grasses, and small trees were replaced by plantain, squash varieties, yam, and by the second or third year fast-growing nut, fruit, and timber trees such as Brazil nuts, peach, palm, and rosewood. This domestic jungle of crops looked and behaved like the real jungle in the plot next door.

Both plots had similar fine root surface area and identical soil fertility. The researchers also put in two control plots: a bare soil plot and a plot planted in a rotating monoculture—maize and beans followed by cassava, followed by a timber crop. They included cassava, banana, coconut, cacao, rubber, and lumber crops such as Cordia species and Swietenia species. The trick to keeping the soil fertile, says Hart, is to choose perennial crops with lots of leaves and roots, so they can protect the soil from hard rains, store nutrients in biomass, and put organic matter back into the soil when they shed.

Hart also found it important to use plants that form symbiotic associations, as well as deep-rooted plants that pumped nutrients from different depths of the soil. In this way, the ground was kept continually covered, yields were provided throughout the year, and each set of new crops prepared the soil physically and even chemically for the next stage.

Once the succession progressed to tree crops, farmers could selectively harvest timber and burn the perennials every few years to start the cycle again. Besides supporting local farmers, this sustained usefulness may also help to slow the relentless clearing of primary jungle. Sir Alfred Howard, whom many credit with the invention of organic agriculture, talked about farming to fit the land in his book, An Agricultural Testament, as did J.

Smith wanted to see eastern hillsides replanted with tree crops, which seemed to suit the hills better than the erosion-causing row crops planted after the great green wall of New World forest was torn down. Smith looked to the eastern deciduous forest as a model of diversity and stability. He described the great number of niches provided by the various tree-canopy levels as well as shrubby and herbaceous understories.

Fallen leaves and debris are slowly and steadily recycled into new plant life, preventing leaching and downslope loss of critical nutrients. The organic litter also encourages the growth of mycorrhiza—fungi that form associations with roots and further extend their water-searching power.

Every now and then, wind or disease or lightning takes out a tree, creating a gap where succession and renewal can begin again. Early agriculture on these soils, practiced by Native Americans, was also successional in nature.

The tribes practiced small-patch agriculture, raising beans, squash, corn, and tobacco on twenty-to two-hundred-acre plots. After eight to ten years, the native farmers would move on and allow the land to lie fallow.

In the twenty-year hiatus before the farmers returned, succession would resume and fertility would be restored. This shifting method required tribes to be nomadic, but it mimicked the natural forest dynamism by creating small patches that were allowed to revert to forest.

In his book, Smith bemoaned the loss of soils and productivity that occurred when white settlers began to farm more permanently on these sites, deforesting hillsides and planting row crops.

Instead, he proposed planting structural analogues—nut-and fruit- bearing trees as the only fitting crops for forest-growing land. One scheme that bore out his dream was a farm of honey locust trees which bore seed crops with an understory of Chinese bush clover a perennial legume suitable for grazing and haying.

This system yielded crops and supported animals, all with minimal labor, low management costs, and good weed control. He reported returns of 4, pounds of hay per acre per year, 2, pounds of honey locust nuts per acre per year on average, with a peak of 8, pounds of nuts per acre in eight-year-old trees.

The features that made the hardwood forest sustainable in the wild were repeated here: a tree crop in the overstory, a stable understory to protect the soil and retain nutrients, a biological nitrogen source, and a grazing or browsing animal component. The fact that his work has been republished by Island Press recently, with a foreword by Wendell Berry, is a hopeful sign that the idea of nature-based farming is sprouting once again.

Across the Sonoran, the Chihuahua, and the Mojave, rainfall is erratic and strongly seasonal, and soils may vary every few feet.

These uneven conditions lead to a patchiness of vegetation—plants cluster in fertile alluvial fans, while on more barren stretches, they space themselves out to get all the water they can. Besides dividing up the space, they also divide up the season. Many species bloom and set seed only when water is available, becoming dormant as the summer blisters on. These strategies, which allow plants to take advantage of ephemeral resources and to endure long dry spells, were mirrored in the farming methods of original peoples who flourished here for thousands of years.

The Papago and Cocopa peoples continue to live here, gathering their foods from both wild plants and cultivated desert plants and legumes, all of which are native to the place, thus adapted to making the most of limited resources.

Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan made readers aware of their agricultural practices in his book Gathering the Desert. To the extent possible, writes Nabhan, the Papago synchronize their agriculture with the local seasonal clock. Planting, for instance, is timed to the emergence of desert annuals—right before or after nourishing rains. By planting only on flood-watered alluvial fans, they avoid having to intensively irrigate, which in that climate of excessive evaporation would leave poisoning salt in the upper registers of the soils.

Besides annuals, the Papago also sow succulents, grasses, and woody plants for food and fiber. Interspersed with the crops are wild mesquite trees, left in the fields because they can fix nitrogen and gather deeply stored soil nutrients. Succession is also used strategically. For instance, practitioners may plant a crop that causes the weed community to shift toward species that are not a problem for the next crop.

Or they might emphasize nitrogen and soil-carbon buildup in one part of the rotation cycle to increase the productivity of subsequent crops. Finally, researchers at Rodale have spent some time, as Jackson has, looking for perennial replacements for annuals such as wheat, rice, oats, barley. Letting the Cows Out in the Midwest Crop growers are not the only ones caught in the box canyon of industrial farming.

For years now, dairy farmers in the upper Midwest have been cutting hay with machines instead of letting the cows graze it. Now all that is changing. They report that they enjoy the work of bringing the cows to their food rather than the other way around.

Grass farmers also find that their cows are healthier and their bills are slimmer. Manure in the fields means they can pare back their fertilizer bills, and because they hay with machinery only twice, they also save money on fuel and machine wear.

After a few years, many of the farmers are shifting to an even more natural cycle. This dry-off allows the grass farmers to do what had been unthinkable in the old system—take a vacation. The term grass farming signals a change in how the farmers see themselves. No one is a complete expert on managing grass pasture for their herds. Beyond this, they turn to one another for advice, and have formed a long-distance support community. To grow good pasture, grass farmers face many of the same challenges that prairie restorers face.

They begin with an alfalfa field, then sow in about four species of grass. As the years wind on, wild plants infiltrate, some that the farmers have never seen before. As Rittmann says, they are watching succession on their lands and comparing notes, learning what the land might have looked like before the plow. One man was at first puzzled and then absolutely thrilled to hear a strange crackling noise in his fields—the sound of hundreds of thousands of earthworm holes opening back up after a rain.

Another farmer said it took three years of grass farming before he finally heard birdsong returning to his pastures. Now he counts and catalogs the bird diversity around his pastures as a way of assessing their health. The spread of the grass-farming idea should be studied carefully for clues. How will The Land Institute sell its idea to farmers who are already treading water as fast as they can just to keep up? How do you spring the mind free from its fears?

Wes Jackson is well aware of all the things our minds have to overcome. For starters, he describes the mind shaped by reductionist science, the American experience, evolution, and affluence.

How, then, will the Breadbasket become a domestic prairie? So far, Perennial polycultures on those same lands would offer farmers an income in addition to holding down their soils. They could collect their income in one of three ways. They could hay the domestic prairies, harvest the seed for human consumption, or, if they have livestock, simply graze them.

This way, the income would come back to the farmer, instead of being shipped off to the manufacturers of pesticides and fertilizers. The time is right for this sort of transition, Piper feels, because the CRP is due to sunset soon, and it may not be renewed. In a survey conducted by the Ohio Soil and Water Conservation Association, 63 percent of farmers said they were planning, for economic reasons, to plow up their CRP lands if subsidies dry up.

To a culture accustomed to causing damage, that sounds sweet to the ear. There are some noneroding bottomlands that are perfectly suitable for planting in row crops—under an organic regime, of course. On these lands, Natural Systems Agriculture makes more ecological sense. Ultimately, the strongest persuader is likely to be changing economic conditions. When the way farmers or anyone else, for that matter have been doing things becomes economically uncomfortable, they will be eager to try something new.

This may happen when fossil fuels begin to run out, making farm inputs such as gasoline, fertilizer, and pesticide prohibitively expensive. Because of its chemical diversity, the farm would naturally protect itself from most pests, tamping down populations before they reach epidemic levels. Weeds would be managed by the chemical interaction of plants and by shading. Nutrients would be held in the soil instead of leaching out. Pesticide and fertilizer use would be minimal, maintenance light, and plantings infrequent.

A farmer could start over with a new crop of perennials every three to five years, but would do so by choice, not by necessity. Livestock would also require less babying. Beef cattle are now being bred with buffalo, for instance, to produce animals with tougher hides, like barns on their backs. These beefalo could be left outside in winter, obviating the need for lumber to build protective structures.

Throughout the year, they could be moved from one polyculture to another in a rhythm that does not jeopardize flowering and seed set. Their wastes would contribute to the crumb structure of the soil, which, along with root action, allows the sod to wick moisture in and allocate it slowly.

More water-holding capacity would mean less call for irrigation. It might even encourage springs to reopen as underground reserves are recharged. The following is an attempt at an itinerary. Consulting the Genius of the Place: Research Wes Jackson compares the typical agricultural researcher to the proverbial drunkard who is looking for his lost keys under the streetlight. In like fashion, our research institutions have searched for agricultural advances where the money is—in the glare of industrial farming.

Taxpayers foot the bill in the form of appropriations to USDA research and in the form of 20 percent investment credits to new private research facilities.

What are we paying for? Right now, the bulk of research helps to shore up the system of farming that is already in place. Most disease dollars, for instance, are spent on diseases that afflict only crops grown in continuous culture, a system we know is anathema to soil fertility.

Instead of investigating markets for alternative crops those that can be grown in rotation , our economists continue to invent new markets for the big input- hungry four: wheat, corn, rye, and soybeans. And, of course, a lot of money goes toward breeding crops that will withstand chemicals. The Land Institute had been striving to keep arable land arable for twenty years now, with negligible federal assistance.

Wes Jackson had been waiting for just the right moment. When The Land staff members had scored five articles in prestigious scientific journals, he put on his meeting clothes and went to Kansas congressman Pat Roberts, who was the Agriculture Committee chair at the time. Jackson laid out a plan for several sites around the country that would be centers for Natural Systems Agriculture.

This network would take this agricultural Kitty Hawk and put it through fifteen to twenty-five years of wind-tunnel tests in different climatic regimes. The congressman answered with a question. Setting Up the Books: Energetics After we all sat down, Jackson started rhapsodizing about his latest passion.

We laugh, and then he explains that ecologists are a breed of accountant. If we are to switch to a more natural agriculture, says Jackson, our systems must also pencil out, in at least two ways: 1 Economically, they must sustain farmers and their communities, and 2 ecologically, they must pay their own energy bills and not draw down the resources of the local landscape or the planet.

It may mean pricing food commodities to reflect their true costs. It may mean eliminating some of the tax breaks that encourage the substitution of capital for labor and essentially subsidize irrational farm expansion and overproduction. In their place, says Strange, we should design policies that give a hand to farmers who are more likely to treat the land well—those on owner-operated, family-held, and internally financed farms. To stay viable, these farms must ultimately break the unhealthy coupling they now have with the petroleum and chemical industries.

Whenever you break the cycle of dependency, you inevitably hear the anguished moans of the addict in withdrawal. Without large farms and fossil- fuel amendments, will we still be able to feed ourselves? Will we be able to feed the world? Consider that we have had a grain surplus every year since the thirties in this country, and that eighty percent of our grain is not fed to people but to livestock. The point is that the sanctity of seeking higher yields—the agronomic equivalent of the search for gold—makes it virtual heresy to drop down to more realistic yields, to what the land will support over time.

The Land realized that in order to defend the yields of perennial polyculture against those of conventional monocultures, it would have to somehow level the playing field. Once you take away the crutches of industrial farming, would it be more economical to grow perennial polycultures or conventional crops?

Cutting down on maintenance, fertilizer, and pesticides is bound to save money, perhaps enough to make this form of farming as competitive as its fuel- dependent cousin.

But now we need the data to prove it. There were studies on organic pesticidefree farms, but none on organic farms that also grew their crops without fertilizer and without diesel fuel.

After twenty years, a lack of published data had come to look more like a red cape than a stop sign to this group. So in , they pawed at the ground a few times and began the Sunshine Farm project: one hundred and fifty acres, conventional crops, tractors that use vegetable oil for fuel, photovoltaic panels for electricity, draft horses for some field operations, longhorn cattle for manure and meat, hens that turn compost then turn a profit with eggs , and broilers that forage in alfalfa.

In all, a demonstration farm where biological and solar energy are expected to pay the bills. Over coffee, he stokes up his computer and shows me a giant database. We literally measure the size, weight, and amount of everything—every fencepost, every galvanized gate, every foot of chicken wire, every plastic pail.

We figure out how much energy it takes society to make that product, and then we record it in kilocalories. A trip to the store for ten- penny nails takes fuel, labor, and the energy society expended to manufacture the nails—all debits against the farm.

In turn, everything the farm produces— all crops, livestock, biofuels, and so on—is recorded as an asset. The trick is to balance the budget so the farm is not a drain on the planet. Can it do all this and grow crops that will reimburse society for the energy embedded in material off-farm purchases? Answers like these will tell us what agriculture really costs, and perhaps, says Bender, suggest a more accurate, long-term cost for what we eat.

The creases in his face, if you counted them, might tell you something about the drought cycles in this part of the world. With impeccable cowboy manners, he touches his hat, apologizes for interrupting, then consults with Bender, not about the chickens or the crops but about the kilowatt meter that monitors the solar-panel array.

This is not your ordinary farm operation, I conclude, at least not yet. Right livelihood might be voluntary today, but The Land Institute predicts that someday it will be mandatory. When fossil fuel runs out or becomes too expensive, people will have to do sunshine farming. In the meantime, Jackson hopes the Sunshine Farm will not be an isolated experiment. So the good examples, whether they are the good examples among organic farmers, or the good examples among research efforts, or just the good examples of ordinary right livelihood, give us a standard.

If we want to weave the ecological paradigm into our research and our economy, we need to bring people back to farm country. Nature teaches us that ecosystems are made up of habitat specialists—local experts who know how to work the system. One hundred and fifty years of farming the American plains has also resulted in an accumulation of local knowledge. People have learned how to time plantings, how to read the weather, and what to expect from soils, insects, diseases, and each other.

The problem is that with the rapid depopulation of the countryside, this knowledge has been disappearing. At this point, only 1 percent of the U. As Wendell Berry observes, no one bemoans the fact that a farm Grange is closing for lack of members; in fact, we are more scandalized by the loss of indigenous rain forest cultures than we are by the loss of American rural cultures.

Jackson notes that this loss of farmers is not the first but the second wave of loss. Moved by this belief, Jackson decided to learn what he could about human communities in rural areas. After all, native peoples lived here for hundreds of years, in far greater concentrations than we have today in some rural counties. How was it that the land could support them in a sustainable way?

Friends and employees of The Land have since begun to move into town, restoring their homes with used lumber and other renewable technologies and transforming the school into an education center and conference space for artists, scholars, and teachers interested in becoming native to their places. What can we safely graft onto that? How can we create patterns of sustainability together?

The people of Matfield—like Evie Mae Reidel who knows what phase of the moon is best for planting potatoes—can help us discover those patterns. With their help, we can teach other homecomers.

Each month, the Tallgrass Prairie Producers, a cooperative devoted to raising prairiefed cattle, gathers to strategize in one of the old, high-ceilinged classrooms. During the summer, workshops will be held here for teachers who are designing a place-based curriculum for rural schoolkids. In the meantime, staff from The Land are conducting an environmental history of the area to see decade by decade how land use has changed.

This is the first phase of an ecological community accounting project designed to determine the human carrying capacity of a place. Our teachers are the prairie and the people who have been shaped by the prairie for generations. Getting your boat into an eddy is hard work. You must cross the line of tension, the rip between the downstream torrent and the curling upstream flow. It takes some momentum and a vigorous, well-placed paddle brace to pivot across the eddy line and into the sanity of smoother water.

In the same way, our transition to sustainability must be a deliberate choice to leave the linear surge of an extractive economy and enter a circulating, renewable one.

Wes Jackson thinks it appropriate that agriculture be the first eddy we enter. He has often called agriculture the Fall, the beginning of our estrangement from nature. Natural Systems Agriculture is as different from conventional agriculture as the airplane was from the train. The only logical champions of this revolution are consumers who care about how their food is grown, small independent farmers, and a government that represents them.

Already people are supporting agriculture that attempts to wean itself from fossil fuels, at least where pesticides and excessive tilling are concerned. The popularity of certified organic foods, food-in-season restaurants, and community supported agriculture CSA are a few examples of eddies that are forming in the river.

Through CSAs, city dwellers subscribe with a local organic farmer at the beginning of the season, then pick up a bag brimming with fresh produce each week of the summer. The farmer gets the money up front, and the buyer shares in the risk, agreeing to eat whatever crops do well and do without those that fail. In this way, consumers learn to eat with the cycles of the local landscape and have the satisfaction of knowing their food is grown nearby and in conscientious ways.

According to Russell Ubby, director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, farms in North America are now doing business via this pre-pay share method. Wisconsin has the most, he says, followed by New York and California. That more people are beginning to care about this aspect of our lives does not surprise me.

The idea that food is more than a commodity is deep within us, which makes the thought of a square tomato seem outrageous, or at least distasteful to most of us. We know that the scale of farming should be smaller and more personal—that the land would be better served by stewardship than by massive tractors sporting six TVs.

The novelist Joseph Conrad said that there are only a few things that are really important for us to know and that all of us know them. We want our farmers to be breaking off an ear of corn to taste a kernel right before harvest.

And I think that instinct comes from our biological urge to survive. Food is something we have it in our genes to care about, and we have been severed from that caring for too long. In reality, they are the conservatives, secure in the knowledge that their ecomodel is older than agriculture, and that it will be here long after oil-driven agriculture is a memory. This is not really a new fangled thing we are inventing here, insists Jackson.

It is just a matter of discovering what is already there and mirroring it. All in all, I think nature-based agriculture will be nourishing in the best sense of the word—an honest and honorable way to take our place in the food web that connects all life. It is a multi-disciplinary approach to sustainable design that follows a set of principles rather than stylistic codes.

It is part of a larger movement known as biomimicry, which is the examination of nature, its models, systems, and processes for the purpose of gaining inspiration in order to solve man-made problems. Biomorphism, or the incorporation of natural existing elements as inspiration in design, originated possibly with the beginning of man-made environments and remains present today.

He used columns that modeled the branching canopies of trees to solve statics problems in Greeks and Romans- natural motifs supporting the vault.

Late Antique and Byzantine- arabesque tendrils are stylized versions of the acanthus plant. The TWA terminal at John F Kennedy Airport, New York, in which Eero Saarinen used biomorphic forms to capture the poetry of flight Frank Lloyd Wright likened the columns in the Johnson Wax building to water lilies and, while they create a spectacular space, they have nothing functionally in common with lily leaves Burdock burr were the source of inspiration for George de Le Corbusier appears to have Mestral — the Swiss engineer who invented Velcro.

Defining a human need or design problem and looking to the ways other organisms or ecosystems solve this, termed here design looking to biology 2. Identifying a particular characteristic, behavior or function in an organism or ecosystem and translating that into human designs, referred to as biology influencing design 1.

With a limited concentrations. ADVANTAGE: Biology may influence humans in ways that might be outside a predetermined design problem, resulting in previously unthought-of technologies or systems or even approaches to design solutions.

Biologists and ecologists must therefore be able to recognize the potential of their research in the creation of novel applications. Termite mounds include flues which vent through the top and sides, and the mound itself is designed to catch the breeze. As the wind blows, hot air from the main chambers below ground is drawn out of the structure, helped by termites opening or blocking tunnels to control air flow.