Rethinking Lifestyle

Last Friday I joined others at the University of Manitoba research station at Glenlea for a 25 year anniversary celebration. The celebration was of the organic crop rotation plots. That in itself is an accomplishment – that it is now 25 years old. This is the oldest project in Canada comparing a conventional crop rotation with an organic crop rotation, allowing the comparison of many aspects of the two rotations.

I was reminded again of the fundamental difference between a conventional and an organic cropping system. In the conventional system, inputs are at the centre of thinking. That is, in the conventional system, chemical fertilizer is applied with a lot of attention to quantity and blend, various pest control chemicals are applied with attention to timing and the selection of the right chemical. These various chemical inputs are applied to the soil and the crop, and the measure of the effectiveness of a treatment is short term yield and short term profitability. By contrast in organic thinking, the farm is seen as part of an ecosystem which needs to be maintained. Effectiveness here is measured in terms of soil health, soil water carrying capacity, soil erosion, natural pest suppression services, natural disease resistance and greenhouse gas emissions, to name but the most obvious of many.

The organic rotation practised at Glenlea has changed over the years – that is no one knew what the ideal organic rotation would be, then or now. For example, initially there were two rotations, one consisted only of annual crops, and the other had perennials as part of the rotation. The perennial crop was removed as hay, that is the whole plant was removed, and in the annual crop rotation only the seed was removed. Clearly in both cases, plant nutrients were being removed from the field, but in the case of the perennial crop, more was being removed than in the case of the annuals. Yields in the rotation which included perennial crops were going down. It became obvious that a farming system where the whole plant is removed two out of four years is not sustainable. That crop rotation has now been modified so that compost from some of the manure of the animals eating the removed forage is returned to the field. As a result of this, yields have recovered, but what is interesting is that the nutrients returned to the field through the compost do not need to match the nutrients removed through plant harvest in order to maintain yields. Soil organisms are at working making more nutrients available.

As I was considering the contrast between the organic and conventional systems, I was reminded of the agricultural work I did in Africa many years ago. As we worked with farmers trying to improve crop yields, it was very obvious that if we applied fertilizers and pest control chemicals we could improve crop yields substantially. However, there was a problem. Given the instability of many African governments, there was no assurance that fertilizers and other crop chemicals would be available every year. We came to realize that crop improvement techniques that did not depend on external inputs were better on the long run.

Of course the Canadian situation is different. We have a much more stable government and a more stable economic system and we are grateful for that. But we need to ask how much more stable is our situation on the long run.