Sun March 08, 2009
Urban people should be concerned about agriculture
Posted By: Paul Hanley

The singer Antony of Antony and the Johnsons is a remarkable artist in many ways. While much of his songwriting has focused on gender, more recently he has begun to write on the human-nature relationship.

Asked in a recent interview why a big city artist cares about nature, he pointed out that people in cities are as dependent on the natural world as any farmer, or hunter-gatherer for that matter. Ultimately everyone owes their breathing, eating, drinking—their life—to the natural world.

True, rural people have a more obvious connection to nature than those living in human-built environments. Some 40 percent of the people on the planet, for example, rely on wood, charcoal, straw or dung as their main source of energy (and 50 to 60 percent for at least some of their energy needs.) A billion people rely on fishing for a large part of their protein requirements. Some 3.5 billion people in developing countries continue to rely on plant-based medicine for their primary health care—as do more and more people in the developed world.

Paradoxically, urban people are even more dependent on the natural world and especially agriculture than rural people. Methods of production that rely on nature have not diminished in the industrial era but increased. Humans now control 25 percent of the primary productivity, i.e. the plant growth, on the planet’s land surface. We use more of the products of nature than ever before, and because of higher levels of consumption, we are more dependent than ever on them.

During the last 100 years, per capita resource consumption rose fourfold; the production of goods and services now requires, on average, for each person, over 80 tons of natural resources annually. And by 2050 the level of consumption of natural resources is expected to rise by an additional factor of three. Our use and dependence on nature, especially through agriculture, actually goes up as the world becomes more urban.

“The central place in every culture should be occupied by agriculture,” says environmental historian Colin Duncan in his book The Centrality of Agriculture—Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature. This may seem naïve or heretical to most living economists, but it was not so in the past. In his influential Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith called the modern order in which industry and foreign trade take precedence over domestic agriculture “unnatural and retrograde.”

Obviously, there have been benefits to this arrangement, but Duncan and others argue that—viewed globally and with an eye to the future—many social and most environmental consequences of this sea change have been negative. Duncan believes no sustainable human future can be conceived unless and until the centrality of agriculture is properly recognized and new economic institutions are developed that will encourage people to take care of their lands.

Strictly speaking, agriculture refers to cultivating plants and rearing livestock. There are of course various branches of agriculture—field-cropping, horticulture, floriculture, apiculture, aquaculture, sericulture, animal agriculture, the production of medicinal plants or fibres such as cotton, and so on. To understand the centrality of agriculture, it helps to broaden our definition to include many other activities in which people work with natural systems to produce products, such as fishing, forestry, silviculture and other means of managing renewable resources.

Agriculture is a unique activity. In agriculture we make products mainly by working collaboratively with living systems and renewable resources. In other industries, we mainly use “dead” non-renewable materials. Agriculture works primarily with plants, the only primary producers of products we can consume directly, or indirectly through the consumption of animal products.

Since agriculture—in the full sense of the word—will continue to play its central role in civilization as urbanization intensifies, one of the most important things that can be done in a sustainable society is to raise its status. Agriculture, and how it is practiced, must become again an important concern for everyone, urban as well as rural.

- Originally in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix February 24, 2009


Sun November 23, 2008
Farm Family Finds Meaning in Service
Posted By: Paul Hanley

Garth Glass gets a deep sense of satisfaction knowing that his farm is providing thousands of nutritious meals for people. Garth, his wife Shelley and son Kent grow organic grain and pulses and raise bison on the edge of the Great Sand Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan.

Like most farmers, the Glass family has been through its share of tests, but 2008 has been a good year. “Our grain bins are full. We produced over 200 tonnes of lentils and I estimate that is enough to make half a million meals or more. I don’t know how many thousands of bowls of breakfast cereal will have come from our farm this year, or how many good meals will be made with high quality meat we produce, but it gives me a very good feeling to think my family is able to feed so many people.”

Garth and Shelley have five children. Kent, who has been working for several years in the lucrative oil and gas industry, returned to farming this year.

“There is a connection and love that comes with farming that far outweighs financial considerations,” says Kent. “Farming is a way to serve humanity. It is also more laid back than the fast pace of working in oil and gas, and much more grounded.”

As members of the Baha’i Faith, the Glass family has been inspired by Baha’u’llah’s emphasis on service. Baha’u’llah, the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, stated that to be engaged in agriculture, when it is done in a spirit of service, is “identical with worship.”
For more of this story visit http://www.bahainews.ca/en/081121-agriculture.