American political economist Gar Alperovitz argues that by eliminating mechanisms for people to work together to achieve a common goal, like with unions and cooperatives, the wealthy minority has forced the poor majority into conditions where they have to operate and survive as individuals . He argues that this phenomenon is symptomatic of corporate capitalism and that US industrial agriculture is implicated in corporate capitalism. Alperovitz further posits “the design of corporate capitalism is unable to sustain values of equality, genuine democracy, liberty, and ecological sustainability as a matter of inherent systemic architecture” . Instead of corporate capitalism, he argues for the systemic design and construction of new institutions, especially locally, that support serious longer-term transformative politics because local institutions provide a context which allows and nurtures the sustained development of an alternative political culture. Among the new institutions Alperovitz describe are cooperatives, neighborhood corporations, land trusts, municipally owned energy and broad band systems, and hybrid forms of community and worker ownership. Local sustainable agriculture institutions include grassroot cooperatives, neighborhood corporations, “permaculture guilds,” farmers’ organizations, and research extension agencies. Some of these institutions, such as cooperatives and community supported agriculture programs , square black flower bucket primarily work to exchange goods – an essential activity in security food and resource sovereignty. Others, such as permaculture guilds, farmers’ organizations, and extension agencies, work to exchange knowledge.
Agroecologist Keith Douglass Warner explains that social learning has become the chief strategy for extending more “sustainable” alternatives within conventional agriculture because expanding sustainable alternatives requires more exchange of knowledge than static expert knowledge or delivery of technology . Warner argued that practitioner-led information generators such as farmers’ organizations are critical because, in many cases, growers and farmers develop agroecological strategies and practices before agricultural scientists. While “local” is a crucial component of sustainability, local institutions alone are not effective . Sustainable agriculture efforts must connect at regional and national levels to provide food items to people and places that have limited or seasonal access to certain varieties of food due to climate, land-use, or population reasons, and sometimes all three.Alperovitz argues that achieving community sustainability, and thereby ecological sustainability, requires planning at a regional or national level because decisions made at larger scales can upend or negatively impact careful local planning . He describes this “Pluralist Commonwealth” vision as a system of public, private, cooperative, and common ownerships structured at different scales and in different sectors. In the context of agriculture, a pluralist commonwealth requires mutual collaboration between grassroots sustainable agriculture efforts and municipal, regional, national, and global efforts such as those undertaken by the USDA and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization . The FAO is one example of an international institution looking to grow support for small-scale grassroots efforts in sustainable agriculture.
At the 2 nd International Agroecology Symposium in Rome , FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva argued that agroecology is a promising mechanism towards achieving the Sustainability Development Goals . He said “to move forward, we need the engagement of more governments and policy makers around the word” . He emphasized that “scaling-up” this initiative must maintain the involvement of family and small-scale farmers . The transition movement is one example of grassroots sustainable agriculture efforts attempting to work within a formal governing system. The transition movement is a social movement originally motivated by the permaculture social movement, aiming to promote sustainable living and build ecological resilience in the near future at local levels. A social movement is an informal network of people that share a collective identity and are aligned in their engagement of a political or cultural conflict . People who identify as members of a movement participate individually or in small groups in activities characteristic of the movement and work towards addressing the conflict. Sometimes members of a social movement form an organized, typically co-located, community that are effectively communities of practice. “Transition” is defined as “transforming the place you live from its current highly vulnerable, non-resilient, oil-dependent state to a resilient, more localized, diverse and nourishing place” . Transition towns across the world have collaborated with city councils and larger governments to create legislation in regards to climate change, peak oil, and more .
Rob Hopkins, the founder of the transition movement explains “the legal structure of a group affects its behaviour and how it is seen by others” . “Flexibility and informality,” Hopkins continues, “is fine for a young initiative, but as you grow and take on more responsibilities you will need more structure and allocation of responsibility” . Agroecology integrates modern and traditional knowledge of agriculture systems, as well as social science and natural science, and emphasizes food sovereignty and social and biological diversity . Agroecology situates human systems within natural systems, eliminating the dualism as discussed at the start of Chapter 1. In building sustainable agroecosystems, agroecology models the structure of natural ecosystems but with human derived inputs and outputs. Agroecology emphasizes environmental sustainability by mimicking natural systems via use of perennial polycultures , reducing reliance on off-farm resources, avoiding synthetic inputs, minimizing toxic materials, conserving energy, and protecting natural resources such as soil and water . In comparison, industrial agriculture emphasizes monocultures , often annuals , use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and heavy machinery to till, plant, and harvest. Snapp et al. have demonstrated that polyculture systems can compete with monoculture systems in terms of yield consistency, grain quality, production profitability, fertilizer efficiency, and farmer preference. Perennial crops , including trees, minimize disturbance of the system while providing additional benefits such as carbon dioxide uptake, soil stabilization, and microclimate control . Natural and semi-natural ecosystem landscapes are ecologically more sustainable, economically more beneficial than converted systems , and are socio-culturally preferable . Maintaining economic sustainability remains a challenge for mainstream agroecology practitioners. For many existing farmers and ranchers, rapid conversion to agroecosystems is not financially practical or possible, so conversion efforts tend to proceed slowly . Most farms stall at early stagesof conversion because of the initial reduction in yield and loss of profits. The farmer’s inability to adjust the economics of the farm’s operation to the new relationships that come from farming agroecosystems, and farmer doubt of the productivity of an agroecosystem in comparison to traditional monocultures, leads to giving up on the conversion . Scientific validation of agroecosystem practices is also challenging. Martin and Isaac argue that “agroecology lacks a theoretical framework for the development and testing of general hypotheses.” Agroecologist Sarah Taylor Lovell and her research team have just established what is believed to be the first “production size” field trial that compares an agroecosystem to the traditional soy and corn rotation in southern Illinois. The 30-acre experiment at the University of Illinois has seven treatments, each repeated three times . At the time of this writing, the experiment is too young to have any preliminary or conclusive results. Such an experiment takes many years to complete, making scientific validation of agroecological practices a slow process. Mainstream agroecology is facing challenges regarding social sustainability among farmers and consumers. Not unlike modern industrial agriculture, the start-up costs for agroecosystems can be unobtainable as they often require continued education, high quality inputs and infrastructures , new or different equipment , and investment in mature plants to reduce time to yield . Unlike conventional agriculture, there are few subsidies and financial programs to support farmers transitioning to sustainable agriculture methods. Because professional agroecosystem crops are novel and in comparatively small supply to conventional crops, their high price prevents the product from being equally available to all consumers .
Social learning is a critical factor in farmers’ adoption of agroecology. Warner criticized the lack of social learning among researchers, square black flower bucket wholesale extension agencies, and farmers. Note that in this context, social learning denotes participation as a group in experiential research and knowledge exchange to enhance common resource protection . Ollivier et al. argue that social learning must engage with the plurality of ontologies, knowledge, and power distribution to effectively support agroecological transitions. Social learning networks are necessary for understanding local ecological conditions and deriving techniques that are regional and social-infrastructure specific. In the United States, land-grant universities and colleges share new research with and provide education to farmers and other residents in their local area through National Institute for Food and Agriculture supported institutions called extensions . Post-Green Revolution, Warner argued, most extensions focused on “transition of technology” with the prospect of increasing yields, giving little thought to the systemic effects that technology has on the farm. Warner attributed farmers’ slow adoption of agroecology to a decline in governmental funding in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and private investment in extension services by conventional agriculture stakeholders . However, a recent effort in the Northwestern United States to redefine extension proprieties to address climate change and state-funded research in sustainable agriculture demonstrates that trend is changing. In contrast to industrial agroecology, grassroots agroecology largely operates outside of the markets, standards, and regulations of mainstream food and agriculture systems, and is thus able to overcome some of the socio-economic challenges professional agroecology faces. For example, grassroots agroecology is typically growing at a small scale for a personal use or a small, often informal market, and so does not have large operational and distribution costs. Grassroots agroecology movements emphasize localization, which dictates that environmental and social goals constrain economic goals .Addressing localization in only some of these ways will not yield a functioning grassroots agroecology because only marginal changes would occur. In Cleveland’s case study, farms in Santa Barbara County annually produce nine times more fruits and vegetables than the population consumes, but less than 4% of produce consumed in SBC comes from within the county . The case study demonstrated that complete localization of fruit and vegetable consumption in SBC, without any changes to farming production practices, would have a marginal reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This was an unsurprising finding for Cleveland and his team given that “food miles” account for only 2.5% of total agrifood system greenhouse gas emissions . Cleveland, however, did suggest that a holistic localization effort, one that addresses the three spatial and structural disconnects, has great potential to improve nutrition and access to fresh fruits and vegetables for the 39.5% of the SBC population that was food insecure. Cleveland concluded that more research is needed on “how localization can be accomplished in a way that directly supports the underlying goals of grassroots localization advocates” . Food sovereignty, social learning, and moderate market values are all ways that grassroots agricultural movements can support the mainstream agroecology discipline. Agroecology has particularly gained traction in the permaculture movement . Through social learning, permaculture draws amateur farmers and gardeners into agroecosystem practice, effectively putting the power to grow and access food sustainably into the hands of the people. Many amateur permaculture gardeners are turning professional and producing a new wave of farmers, most of which are young and practice in urban or suburban settings and sell their product locally.The term “ethnobotany” was coined by J.W. Harshberger in the late 19th century to describe botanists’ study of how indigenous people used plants in their local contexts. Ethnobotany research dates back as far as the 15th century when Europeans began colonizing the Americas. Midway through the 20th century, anthropologists expanded the field of ethnobotany when they began to study how human societies, particularly those that were preliterate, understood and classified plants and animals . It became a point of fascination to ethnobiologists that non-industrialized communities of people were able to control “an extensive body of knowledge akin to the scientific fields of botany and zoology” . Beginningin the 1940’s, the ethnobotany scope of study gradually expanded from indigenous people to include the study of the relationship of all humans with plants, particularly in a local context . For example, Ford argued that folk knowledge is held even by middle class Americans that maintain their yard . Folk knowledge, sometimes called traditional knowledge, refers to what “local people know about the natural environment,” which can be contrasted to scientific knowledge which is information derived from rigorous research using formal methods . The study of ethnobotany has been integral to food sustainability research and activism since the advent of agroecology in the 1970’s. Human ecologist David Cleveland suggests that integrating traditional knowledge, technologies, and mindsets, particularly in the form of sustainable agroecosystems, is the best way to address a global food crisis in which the human carrying capacity of Earth is reached or exceeded .