The desirability of carbon-rich soil is a no-brainer for anybody engaged in agriculture and other land-based forms of food production. The fact that carbon is volatilized practices such as tilling the soil is less known, but well-documented in the literature, with millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) being released into the atmosphere through the action of microbes that turn the carbon, present in the soil as organic matter, into its gaseous form. This is why, for example, simply adopting no-tillage practices could reduce by a whopping 30% the greenhouse gas emissions of the agricultural sector. That might not sound like much at first sight, considering that agriculture is not the major contributor to anthropogenic climate change, but its meaning is more evident when considering it this way: changing a single, non-essential technique could bring down the emissions from an entire economic sector by one third. That is just one of many examples of what carbon farming can do when it becomes a conscious agricultural goal. In light of the environmental benefits to be drawn from adopting carbon-farming strategies, the question arises of where organic agriculture stands in the face of the environmental responsibility of the whole agricultural industry. Organic agriculture is sustained on principles such as ecology and care, and, as such, organic farms conduct their activities on a wider range of values that allow them to explore and integrate newer, innovative practices with more ease. Organic farmers also understand better the interrelated nature of beneficial practices, and are more willing to put them into action — particularly women of educated backgrounds. Based on this, there’s the question of whether organic growers should target carbon farming as their next main concern. It is evident that organic farming is expanding nowadays from being a purely non-chemical fertilization scheme into a set of practices, cultural references, values and social networks that aim to farm sustainably the world’s soils. By exploring techniques and practices for carbon-farming such as agroforestry and crop diversification, organic farmers can, at the same time, expand the biodiversity of their lands (already a major benefit of organic agriculture, with its consequent effect in ecosystem resilience and the pest resistance of crops), organic farmers could potentially be introducing changes that are economically very sound and that, at the same time, benefit the world and increase the strength of their agricultural operations. The question appears, then: in the ideally diversified crop scheme of an organic farm, shouldn’t carbon be, indeed, considered the next organic crop? Cotton and pine growing in an alley cropping system, an agroforestry practice that can help retain and absorb carbon into agricultural soils.

It was the fall in Versailles when a group of international participants (five, in total) arrived at the first meeting of a “big national conference” that the president of the French organic society Nature et Progrès, Roland Cheviot, had organized, and to which he had invited over fifty organizations from around the world. This conference decided, with the collective assent of its attendants from the United States, South Africa, France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, to conform itself into a new formal organization: the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, or IFOAM, from its initials. The date was 1972, nearly fifty years ago. The original letter was sent by Roland Cheviot to the first invitees to the IFOAM conference of 1972. Only five groups responded and attended, and became the inaugural five members of the organization. Today, IFOAM – Organics International (the new official name of the organization, chosen in 2015) articulates the collective needs and desires of over 800 different members, hailing from a total of 117 countries. Their work spans all the main areas for the promotion of organic agriculture, from facilitating production to stimulating demand, to participating in the formation of national policies on organic agriculture and offering certifications for national certifiers themselves, all the way from country-wide certification bodies to locally-based Participatory Guarantee Systems (PSG) and other strategies designed to help smallholders get their own organic certification. In fact, among its policy and regulation initiatives, the IFOAM leads the single accreditation program for national certification bodies to exist at this date, guaranteeing that certifiers are certified themselves and that their approval implies a real commitment to the principles of organic agriculture. These and other IFOAM activities are detailed in the organization’s Strategic Plan 2017-2025, entirely available online (in fact, the IFOAM’s transparency is one of the reasons why it was ranked first among all NGOs by OWT’s Global Accountability Report in 2008). The growth of the International Federation, 1972-2009 (by John Paull, from the University of Tasmania). The usefulness of the work that the people at the IFOAM do is immensurable for organic growers. Not only through certification and policies, which help to build consumer trust in an ‘organic’ brand that is at risk of being coopted and stripped of its meaning, but through creating knowledge hubs in Africa to promote education in organic practices, aiding organic smallholders in developing value chains for their products, and helping people in mountainous regions exchange techniques and expertise on growing diverse food to improve their nutritional intake. Its work is substantial and ongoing, and increasing awareness of it (with the consequent stream of new members joining the organization) can in turn increase the strength of its voice globally and the impact of its actions, all the way to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where the IFOAM represents all organic farmers worldwide. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements forms, in this way, the institutional backbone for the global organic movement, and for the creation of an Organic Agriculture 3.0 that is inclusive, impactful, and meaningful to big and small producers around the world.

Agricultural heritage systems may sound like they belong to the past, or like they are very limited to specific cultural contexts and thus unable to teach lessons that can elicit universal interest. They may sound like that, but that's not what they are: an agricultural heritage system might be being developed in your very own city, right now, while some system from Peru or India is being studied at an Ivy League college ecology department for lessons of how to manage crop production more efficiently. In fact, here are five major perks of agricultural heritage systems that might make you want to take a look at them as something more than a curiosity: 1) They sustain biodiversity on several layers. With the role of biodiversity being increasingly recognized for both the role it plays in preventing the homogenization and genetic impoverishment of crops as well as in establishing networks of biological pest control, these agricultural heritage systems often act as a reservoir for landrace varieties of common crops (that sometimes have even evolved to be resistant of a specific plague) where that genetic diversity can be kept alive and evolving. This biodiversity means an increased stability in yields over time, as there is a consistently reduced chance of catastrophic failures for each year's harvests. In short, these systems sustain both a diversity of varieties of the crops they serve to grow, as well as a variety of species of insects and other animals that make them actual reservoirs of zoological biodiversity. Much like how the urban gardens could help save the bumblebees. Areas near agricultural heritage systems present a diversity of varieties of the same crops, like the variety of potatoes in this street market in Huancayo, Peru. 2) They serve as experimental cases of study. According to a 2011 FAO booklet, agricultural heritage systems are also live experiment grounds from which scientists can discover new ways to improve the efficiency of commercially dominant food production systems. Or, as the FAO puts it: "By studying traditional systems, scientists can learn more about the dynamics of complex systems, especially about the links between agricultural biodiversity and ecosystem function and thereby contribute to the enrichment of the ecological theory and derive principles for practical application in the design of modern sustainable farming systems. For example, in deciphering how intercropping practice works, farmers can take advantage of the ability of cropping systems to reuse their own stored nutrients. This information can be gleaned to improve the ways in which farmers can manage soil fertility." 3) They are essential for food security. Tied to these two last points, agricultural heritage systems also serve as barriers against famine in their local areas, especially with the looming threat of climate change, and they could very much improve the stability and safety of all areas of the world that start to face similar challenges to the ones that these systems faced during their creation. The tassa farming techniques of the western Sahel or the systems of acequias of southern Spain are just a couple of examples of low-technology, simple ways of facing permanent or frequent drought conditions, while the famous systems of terracing that are used in millions of acres of slopes across South Asia and South America could help to turn steep land into productive farmland, as more and more plains around the world start to be flooded by rising sea levels. Terraces with recently sown potatoes, tomatoes and squash near the city of Arequipa, in Peru. 4) They generate cultural changes, for the better. Agricultural heritage systems are, almost necessarily, a communal affaire. Be they managed by just a few families, by villages, by many or just a few people separately or together, agricultural heritage systems create cultural ties around them that generate a new way to look at food production, a new culture of cultivation that challenges the dominant paradigm that sustainable and efficient food production requires tractors, an uninterrupted flow of organic fertilizers and pesticides, and acres upon acres of land where a single species is grown. They also serve as a space for the interaction of all the members of a community in the pursuit of a common goal and could serve to combat the hidden epidemic of loneliness that hits the US and the whole developed world. 5) They are alive and expanding, and new ones can be created. Probably the best perk of agricultural heritage systems, however, is that their number is not fixed. As much as they can die if the communities built around them stop taking care of them (due to migration, changing climate, better economic opportunities for the young elsewhere, war, or any of the many challenges that communities around the globe face), they can also begin from scratch if a community or just a single individual start the task of creating one. The whole aim of the permaculture movement, in fact, could perhaps be defined as the creation of new agricultural heritage systems, where the 'perma' part of permaculture is the permanency of the system over time, across generations. A legacy for the future generations can be started today, and it can be both efficient and productive: that is, in the end, the greatest perk of agricultural heritage systems, and the secret of their survival until today. Terraces in a new eco-village in the Cameroonian chiefdom of Bandrefam, Kouo'shi Ndamzù, which began to exist in 2017.

By 2012, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation reported impacting figures on an alarming matter: only thirty species of plants are nowadays covering 95% of all the vegetable-based, daily caloric and protein intake for the average person in the world. Shortly put, our food comes mainly from those thirty-two species, and 60% of it comes from actually just three: corn, rice and wheat. What results more alarming is that this loss of agricultural biodiversity is also coupled with a loss of genetic diversity within those thirty species. Already in the year 2000 (that’s over twenty years ago!), the FAO reported as well that around 75% of all plant genetic diversity had been lost “as farmers worldwide have left their multiple local varieties and landraces for genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties”. In that report, however, the FAO mentioned that over 7000 (known) species have been cultivated as edible throughout history, with several thousand still being on cultivation. Orphan or underutilized crops are precisely that; the many species which are often tied to very specific ethnic communities or who are, for some reason or another, not used to the full extent of their potential. If we take the figures of the FAO as a reference, that would mean that 99.5% of all cultivated plant species are underutilized or ‘orphan’, with the remaining 0.5% being made up by those main thirty species. Quinoa, for example, though increasingly popular, is has by no means been used to its full potential as a very nutritious and genetically varied crop. This is not an innocuous number, however. What that percentage means is that if those thirty species are wiped out (heck, even if three of those thirty species are wiped out!) by disease, climate change or an unknown pest, we would be facing hunger and economic catastrophe at alarming levels. In order to fight this, an international organization was established in Malaysia in 2009: Crops for the Future (CFF), a team of experts that works to fight genetic impoverishment of crops and build a net of food safety around our current eating habits. They are even suggesting the building of a database, which could provide access to specific suggestions of a certain species or variety for determinate climatic and economic conditions. The issue of agricultural biodiversity is by no means reduced to these few facts, though: it is one that we’ll keep exploring in future articles in this blog. In the meantime, happy growing!

In a world where the climate is rapidly changing, the development of strategies to resist the negative effects of this change through adaptation has found a new ally in looking back to past technologies. Some of these technologies, developed specifically throughout the centuries in determinate ecological contexts, were abandoned over time in favor of nowadays conventional agricultural practices. These agricultural heritage systems (or AHS for short) represent at the same time some of the latest innovations in food systems around the world, being discovered in their original context and explored in permaculture projects around the world. Sometimes these systems are even rediscovered in areas where they used to be prevalent, such as with the suqakollo systems of irrigation originally used in the pre-Hispanic Andean regions of South America, and recently recovered after many centuries of having fallen in disuse. A waru waru or suqakollo system sustaining crops in the Andean region. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has been maintaining, with this reality in mind, the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems project; a catalogue that seeks to list and explore all of the agricultural heritage systems that have the potential to contribute to the reduction of hunger around the world, the recovery of degraded ecosystems (since these practices traditionally align well with the purposes of conservation agriculture) and the improvement of yields in specific climatic conditions. Or, as the folks at the FAO put it: "The resilience of many GIAHS sites has been developed and adapted to cope with climatic variability and change, i.e. natural hazards, new technologies and changing social and political situations, so as to ensure food and livelihood security and alleviate risk. Dynamic conservation strategies and processes allow maintaining biodiversity and essential ecosystem services thanks to continuous innovation, transfer between generations and exchange with other communities and ecosystems." As the world transitions from a perspective of the soil as a resource to be exploited to a system to be maintained through clever stewardship, the knowledge of past generations (who had far more limited resources, and were thus forced to innovate and strive to maximize yields) comes in handy, and ties directly with the recent statistical discoveries on the superior efficiency of small agricultural operations in contrast with larger farms. Once again it becomes clear that the past is not dead: it is not even the past!

‘Green lacewings’ is one of the names commonly given to the insects of the genus Chrysoperla, in turn a member of the family Chrysopidae (remember, it’s kingdom – phylum – class – order – family – genus – species), called ‘lacewings’ because of their delicately ornamented wings, which are translucent and present a complicated pattern that resembles lace. Lacewings, and especially green lacewings, can be some of the most ferocious predators of damaging insects that there are; especially since they are generalist predators: they’ll eat everything from mealybugs to spider mites and grasshoppers. They are predators only at their larval stage, becoming harmless nectar and pollen eaters once they reach adulthood. Far from becoming useless, though, this is the stage of their lives when the attention of the organic grower shifts towards giving them a space to live and lay the eggs for the next generation of lacewings. They’re also pollinators at this stage, thus doubly benefitting the crops. An adult specimen of Chrysoperla carnea. One single larva of lacewing insects can eat up to three hundred aphids during its lifetime, which means that just ten larvae can consume three thousand aphids; a hundred larvae, thirty thousand; and a thousand larvae of lacewing insects can consume the incredible amount of 300,000 aphids over the course of two or three weeks. Each adult can lay around 200 eggs, so the math adds up to a rather quick control of any soft-bodied insect pest, as long as the environment is diverse enough with other sources of food to actually sustain the lacewings across generations. Otherwise, augmentative techniques for their usage will have to be applied (though they’ll probably still be very much worth it!). A larva of Chrysoperla carnea (imagine seeing that coming towards you as an aphid!) AGENT PROFILE Common name(s): Green lacewings, common lacewings. Often-used species: Chrysoperla carnea, Chrysoperla rufilabris. Type of predator: Generalist. Potential damaging effects: None registered. Interesting literature on its usage: Against sucking pests of tomatoes (2020), against the parasite of olive trees Saissetia oleae (2020), against mealybugs that attack cassava plants (2017), against the Brazilian species of thrips Enneothrips flavens (2014), against lettuce aphids and western flower thrips (2013), against the whitefly Enneothrips flavens (2008), a methodology of its application in the field (2016).

According to a recent study, we live a world that is seeing an ever-growing concentration of farmland into fewer hands: around 70% of the currently cultivated land is being owned by the top 1% of all farms, while, in contrast, 80% of all individual farms have land of two hectares or less, and operate only around 12% of the currently cultivated land. Here's a general graph of that, taken directly from the study: It may seem like this is a natural economic process by which larger farms tend to swallow the competition by offering better prices to the consumers, which they can allow themselves because the reduced costs of a more efficient production structure. But think again: that small 12% of all cultivated land produces 35% of all the world’s food. The other 88% of land, meanwhile, produces a much less impressive 65% of all the food we eat. This actually correlates to a well observed inverse correlation between farm size and farm efficiency, though experts can’t quite place their fingers on the direct causes behind that. Given all of this data, it’s evident that keeping small farms in business is key to preserve food safety and reach the Second Sustainable Development Goal of the United Nations: zero hunger by 2030. And here’s where conservation agriculture comes into play, by directly giving many major advantages to small farms, of which we can outline three as good examples: 1) Lessening costs and reducing labor input in the long run by aiming to increasingly develop the fertility of the soil instead of simply pumping it away through the traditional methods of exploitative agriculture. Conservation agriculture aims to reduce the recurrent costs of fertilization, and thus increase the medium and long-term profitability of agricultural operations while also doing away with the labor costs of tilling the soil and intensive weeding by replacing both of these operations with the smart usage of cover crops, among other novel techniques. 2) Making them more resilient to climate change by improving the capability of the soil to absorb and store water (thus helping to prevent and even reverse desertification), avoiding the salinization of the soil that comes from the intensive usage of inorganic fertilizers and preventing the erosion of the soil by wind and water through a constant maintenance of a vegetable cover. Farms that operate according to the principles of conservation agriculture and also use organic fertilizers have the added benefit of developing a soil ecosystem of bacterial probiotics and mycorrhizal fungi, which adds an extra layer of protection against drought, disease, erosion and nutrient depletion. This study from 2020, which also explores the benefits of conservation agriculture for preventing soil erosion, presents these two possible worldwide projections of water-caused soil erosion for the next few decades, to a good extent aided by climate change: 3) Increasing availability of loans and credit, a benefit unknown to many, is actually present in major countries such as the United States, where the Department of Agriculture offers loans of up to 1.75 million dollars to farms who need funding to undertake a conservation project in their land (see here for a quick explanation of how that works!). Meanwhile, in the European Union, and in some cases to an international extent, similar initiatives are managed by the European Agricultural Fund For Rural Development (EAFRD) and the Agricultural Financing Initiative of the European Development Finance Institutions (EDFI AgriFI). These benefits are just the tip of the iceberg that help balance the sometimes higher, or relatively high costs that the adoption of conservation agriculture in smaller farms implies. In the end, who wouldn’t have a more resilient, profitable farm and better credit to attain that? One thing is sure: even though this article ends here, the benefits of transitioning to conservation agriculture surely don’t.

Possibly the biological pest control agent by excellence, ladybugs have become a staple in the market of insects used to combat plagues, especially for their role in the control of aphids. But ladybugs, the members of the insect family Coccinellidae, can feed on a wide range of plagues that go from caterpillars and beetle larvae (genus Coleomegilla of ladybugs) to mites (genus Stethorus) and whiteflies, thrips, mealybugs, and psyllids. About 90% of the species of this family are beneficial to crops, with the remaining 10% being either neutral or, very rarely, damaging under some circumstances. All of these damaging ladybugs are known to belong to the same subfamily, Epilachninae, however, and so when the ladybugs are used as a biological agent of pest control the species to be released are carefully selected to be entirely carnivorous or almost entirely carnivorous, to make sure that they do not harm the crops that they are supposed to protect. Two ladybugs: Henosepilachna guttatopustulata (left), a common pest of solanaceous plants, and Coccinella septempunctata (right), a major agent of biological pest control. The ladybugs like the left one comprise less than 10% of all the species of this family. Since ladybugs are predators both as larvae and as adults, and since some species have adult individuals that overwinter before the first frosts and reemerge on the following spring, the number of damaging insects that one of these can eat is astounding: up to five thousand aphids alone per ladybug. If a thousand lacewings could eat 300,000 of those over a few weeks, ladybugs can eat up to 5,000,000 (yes, that's five million aphids!) over the course of one or two years. This can effectively solve plague problems over the whole growing season, rather than during the limited time in which other agents of biological pest control are in their larvae stage. This also highlights the importance of implementing a conservative model of pest control species introduction, in which the insects are not merely released by the thousands each year, but actually stimulated to establish and reproduce in cropland areas. Since one single ladybug can lay over 300 eggs during her life, establishing a permanent population of ladybugs can really pay up over time. The life stages of ladybugs. They are highly predatory in both the larval and adult stages. AGENT PROFILE Common name(s): Ladybugs, ladybeetles, ladybirds. Often-used species: Depending on the region, native or long-established species are almost always used. Type of predator: Depends on the species, some are generalist and some are far more specialized. Potential damaging effects: None registered from any species outside the Epilachninae subfamily. Interesting literature on its usage: A general overview of these insects (2014), a general review of their usage against soft-bodied insects (2017), a review of the use of exotic species, with an interesting subsection discussing the importance of biodiversity in the landscape to ensure their establishment and efficacy (2020), a review of their use against aphids in particular (2015).

Organic agriculture is a different sort of business. It is, of course, still a business, where profitability and productivity matter (how could they not, when feeding human beings is the end goal?) but it is a business of a different kind. That difference comes from its end goals: while the average view of a business makes it responsible to its shareholders and its customers, the view of organic businesses makes them responsible to their shareholders, customers and the society at large. They are responsible to the whole planet, and their responsible land stewardship practices are a display of that. It could simply be said that organic businesses do not aim to externalize their environmental, social and public health costs: they aim to have no such costs at all. Based on this inherent ethical outlook of organic agriculture, it makes sense for all organic businesses to have a set of common principles; guiding values that can articulate what the label ‘organic’ means at a global scale. The IFOAM (the umbrella organization that gives an international, common voice to organic agriculture) has sought to do just that, by producing a list of four main principles that can be said to represent the ultimate aims of the organic movement as a whole. The first of those principles (the rest of which we’ll explore in future entries) is health. Health understood not in the narrow sense of not being sick, but instead, as the IFOAM defines it, understood as: …the wholeness and integrity of living systems. It is not simply the absence of illness, but the maintenance of physical, mental, social and ecological well-being. Immunity, resilience, and regeneration are key characteristics of health. The commitment to health of organic agriculture is thus not only to the health of the people it feeds (which it also fulfills, by putting healthier food on the world’s tables), but also to the overall health of the societies in which it exists and the ecosystems within which it works. It commits itself even to the mental well-being of those that know, by its responsible (and accountable) commitment to this and the rest of its principles, that it is a system for producing food that will not harm the very humanity that serves as its end goal. The health of these organic heads of cattle is no less important for the farmer than the health of the soil they live in, of the people that are going to be fed by them, or of those who simply live near this land, and who might be affected by inadequate management practices. Health is a complex concept, and organic agriculture aims to embrace that complexity. Of course that, using such a broad definition, health as a principle for organic agriculture cannot be fulfilled without paying attention to other values as well. Ecology, care and fairness – none of them can truly be left out.

When promoting policies that support and stimulate organic agriculture, one common criticism is heard: that organic agriculture lacks the potential for scalability; that, in spite of its environmental and social benefits, it is unable to ensure enough food production for everyone in the world to be fed. While there’s a mainstream assumption that organic systems of food production result in lower yields, there is a couple of corresponding questions that, being hardly mainstream, are hardly ever are answered: Are the world’s soils already producing food at maximum capacity? Does our current food production reach the levels required to feed everyone? The answer to the first question is negative, and the second is positive. The world is already producing enough food to feed everyone, and the world’s soils are not producing as much food as they could. This last answer to that first question is, in fact, one of the strongest arguments in favor of worldwide adoption of organic agriculture – especially in the world’s poorest regions. Organic tomatoes grow using traditional zaï techniques in the village of Vathaba, Guinea, where a serious problem of chronic malnutrition affects up to 40% of the country's population. Not only is the claim that organic agriculture gives lower yields an oversimplification (on which crops? In which regions? During which periods of the year? Using Integrated Pest Management techniques or not?), but it is an outright wrong claim in zones of the world. Nearly fifteen years ago already (in 2007), a study by the University of Michigan found that, by reducing the average input costs, stimulating soil preservation and formation, and using nitrogen-fixing Bacteria cover crops in crop rotation, organic agriculture could rise the agricultural yields in developing countries by 80%. In a world where enough food is already being produced but not enough food is being distributed, increasing food production in the areas where it is most needed could provide a basis for eradicating hunger, one of the Development Goals of the Millennium. It could also bring a lot of economic benefits to producers in those same developing countries, by reducing their expenses and increasing the economic benefits that they extract from their land. The FAO speaks along the same lines, though giving a lower estimate (that it’s still significantly higher than the present distribution): Conversion of global agriculture to organic management, without converting wild lands to agriculture and using N-fertilizers, would result in a global agricultural supply of 2640 to 4380 kcal/person/day. Sustainable intensification in developing countries through organic practices would increase production by 56 percent.