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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.

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!

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.

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.

Seen from the outside, agriculture may seem to be a magical process: things are planted in the soil, cared for during a season, and food is harvested eventually: from useless dirt, the world is fed. But when farmers go into their fields and harvest the year's crop of wheat, peppers, or watermelon, they know that they're not creating food out of anything. They know what came into their field (the work they put in, the bio-manure they brought as fertilizer, the insecticides they introduced for pest control), and understand that agriculture is not an operation of creation but of transformation. Food does not spring out of the ground: raw resources are transformed into food through a lot of work, and a lot of brainpower. And the root of this transformation happens within the plants themselves, who take nutrients from the soil and energy from the sun and support seven billion people and the whole of life on earth. But plants were not made by human beings: they appeared through natural processes millions of years before the first mammal even stepped a foot on our planet. As such, they are regulated by processes that were not made by us; we human beings merely channel and instrumentalize those processes to feed ourselves. Same as the natural processes underlying soil fertility, water availability, nutrient retention, soil structure maintenance, pest control, and even seed saving: all of them were active way beyond human beings began harnessing their power for their benefit. The basis of agriculture is, thus, ecology; the principles and processes that guide how ecosystems work. There is no agricultural activity that is not based on ecological processes: there is just agriculture that is consciously based on them and that, as such, becomes sustainable, and agriculture that unwillingly goes against ecological processes and, as such, is unsustainable and leads to hunger crises and environmental troubles of all sorts. Organic agriculture is agriculture practiced through the most scientifically-informed techniques for managing agricultural land as an ecosystem. It is a system of practices that collaborates with, rather than fighting against, the very natural processes that gave origin to live on earth — as such ecology is another of its principles, alongside health, fairness, and care. In fact, it might be said to form the basis of them all. A quick glance at the myriad natural processes underlying soil degradation, which organic agriculture takes into account to prevent the loss of fertile soil, gives a good impression of the connectedness of agriculture to ecology as one of its foundational principles.

It would seem counterintuitive that emphasizing nature would foster deeply human values – at least, from the perspective of human beings as different or separate from the natural world. This is the perspective of most of the modern agriculture, one in which the soil is there to be exploited for the production of food, and only secondarily and for that purpose it is fed inorganic nutrients in large quantities; large enough to overflow with them and send those nutrients into rivers, ponds, and seas. A study from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, however, suggests that behind alternative practices or agriculture lies an altogether different set of human values. In Empathy-Conditioned Conservation: "Walking in the Shoes of Others" as a Conservation Farmer, a research paper published by the University in 2011, researchers found that the main motivation behind adopting tillage conservation practices among farmers was an unexpected one: empathy. As this early summary of the research indicates, even though a potential increase in profits, the education received by farmers and the financial support of the government were counted among the variables that influenced whether the farmers adopted conservation tillage practices, a change in these influenced the probability of adoption by around 1% or less. In contrast, having an empathetic mentality (which the authors describe as “tempering the pursuit of self-interest with shared other-interests”) was the single most influential variable, increasing by around 10% the probability of adopting these techniques. The Blue River in Nebraska, looking downstream. The farmers that take care of the lands on the margins of this river formed the basis for the study's sample. The study, which used as a sample the farmers around Nebraska and Kansas, in the United States, that had lands surrounding the Blue River, found that empathy played a role depending on how much the farmers regarded that leached soil and nutrients, coming from lands managed without the adequate conservation practices, affected their neighbors downstream. When farmers realized how their neighbors downstream were being affected negatively, the majority of them received a strong motivation to implement conservation practices, which in some areas led to an adoption of no-till or low-till management schemes is up to 90% of all farms. To the authors, this is evidence of how “farmers pursue a joint and interdependent own-interest and not only self-interest as presumed in microeconomics”. To policymakers, it should make one thing clear: deeply human values such as empathy are key for the widespread adoption of organic agriculture, as a responsible and sustainable way of producing food for the world. Though economic benefits are certainly a motivation to switch to organic land stewardship, there are otherwise neglected benefits and values that must be brought into the calculations underlying a massive adoption of organic agriculture.

Around the world and throughout history, slugs are one of the most enduring and pervasive pests that plague plant cultivation. Slugs cause damages not only to crops, but to pastures, gardens, and, in some regions, even fruit tree plantations, resulting in around 60 million dollars in yearly damages in the United States alone. In the UK, that number ascends to 100 million sterling pounds, and with the potential expansion of the Spanish slug (Arion vulgaris) and other invasive slug species threatening the world's agriculture, those numbers could go much higher. To make things worse, the methods used until now to reduce slug damage have increased soil degradation, ultimately working against growers' best interests. A chapter of the Handbook of Vegetables Pests, published by Academic Press in 2001, recommends for example a finely textured or compacted soil, regular tillage, and the lack of residual organic matter (i.e. mulch) as means to prevent an expansion of the slug problem; all of the methods that also produce soil exposition to environmental degradation. The discovery of a biological means of control for slugs was, consequently, a major advantage for agriculture. Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, the main agent for biological control of slugs. Enter the humble nematode Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, only adequately studied in the 1990s, and now commercialized around the world as a safe and effective tool for slug control. Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita is a tiny nematode of barely less than two millimeters long (often visible only with a microscope) that enters into the bodies of slugs and parasites them, producing between 200 to 300 other nematodes in the process. Between the introduction of the first nematode into the body of the slug and its ultimate death, a period of 4 to 21 days follows in which the slug will feed gradually less, and at the end of which it will crawl into a secluded space before dying. The nematodes keep acting and reproducing throughout wet or dry weather, as long as slugs are active (especially when they are active, in fact!). These biological control agents such as pesticides and insecticides also fulfill one of the main conditions to qualify as such at a large scale, which is not becoming an invasive pest itself. Fortunately enough for growers, Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodite has also evolved to target only molluscs, and as such does not attack earthworms, insects, birds, spiders or humans. AGENT PROFILE Common name(s): Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, commercialized under the name Nemaslug® . Often-used species: Only the mentioned above. Type of predator: Not predatorial, parasitic. Potential damaging effects: Against non-damaging or beneficial freshwater snails; as such it should not be used near bodies of fresh water. Interesting literature on its usage: A general review on its usage and effects (2009), a brief study of the species in the scientific journal Nematology (2019), on the possibility of similarly useful species existing (2019), a case study on its effectivity on two slug species (2002).

The crown jewel of biological pest control, Bacillus thuringiensis is a species of bacteria that has become one of the most frequently used (if not the most frequently used) biological insecticides around the world. Its insecticide properties appear when this bacterium (bacteria is the plural) enters the phase of its life called sporulation, in which bacteria turn into something similar to spores by dividing within their own cellular walls, with one part of those who have divided consuming the rest and entering into a dormant state. This behavior is triggered by environmental factors like drought or a lack of nutrients available, which is often the case when Bacillus thuringiensis is applied artificially on a field. As part of that process of sporulation, these bacteria produce a certain type of protein that interacts with the gut of insects who have consumed leaves or stalks that were inoculated with Bacillus thuringiensis: the insects eventually have their whole digestive systems disrupted, eventually stopping eating and dying of hunger. This can happen as soon as a few hours after having consumed the inoculated plants, or take as long as a few weeks, according to an estimate of the National Pesticide Information Center of the US. These little creatures have saved millions of people from famine, among other achievements. Bacillus thuringiensis is an absolute juggernaut of biological pest control, targeting pests as diverse as moths (tent caterpillars, tomato hornworm, date moth, flour moth), nematodes, beetles (such as the Western corn rootworm, Diabrotica virgifera virgifera), mosquitoes, and fungus gnats. Furthermore, it does all of this while respecting beneficial insects such as bees, butterflies, or other biological control agents such as lacewings or predatory wasps (because none of these consumes enough plant matter to contract a Bacillus thuringiensis infection), as well as being safe for human beings. AGENT PROFILE Common name(s): Bacillus thuringiensis. Often-used species: Single species, with subspecies used to target specific pests (such as Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis for mosquitoes). Type of predator: Non-predatorial (parasitic). Potential damaging effects: No significant ones registered to date. Interesting literature on its usage: A fact sheet on Bacillus thuringiensis, from pages 109 to 113 (2020), use against mosquitoes (2020), use against nematodes (2003), against fungus gnats (2001), a detailed paper on how the bacterium functions and its derivative use in non-organic, transgenic agriculture (1998).

In past articles of this series we have covered with certain detail the thirteen micro and macronutrients that all plants need to survive and grow, as well as some traditional (inorganic and organic) methods of adding nutrition to the soil. The only question that remains for now is: how can the availability of these nutrients be assured? That is, how can growers ensure that, should they be unable to fertilize their fields for one growing season (let’s say), the land will not become a barren, inhospitable, infertile space? The answer to this lies in taking notice of other factors behind the measurable presence of nutrients in the soil. If a landscape is always in need of repeated fertilization to remain productive it is already in a very precarious state, in which most of the fertilizers are probably consumed during a growing season and the soil is, otherwise, inhospitable if not intensively managed. The only way to responsibly address this is to start building the soil, and here we will focus especially in two aspects of this: soil pH, and water content. All of the nutrients that we have talked about becoming more or less available according to the acidity or alkalinity of a soil. Soils that are more acidic have less availability of calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg), because these chemical compounds become less mobile and plants have more difficulty absorbing them. At the same time, iron (Fe), manganese (Mn), and zinc (Zn) become far more mobile and available to plants, while phosphorus (P) becomes more available at first and later is almost completely immobilized. An increase in alkalinity (that is, an increase in pH levels) reverses these processes. This is why the pH of the soil is a critical condition to be balanced and preferably adjusted to the requirements of most crops (6.0 to 7.0, but it may vary depending on the species). Here's a full pH scale, so we can contextualize that: And here's a table depicting the availability of most nutrients and micronutrients according to soil pH, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: The water content of the soil is another major component, simply because it makes every chemical substance within the soil more soluble. Even though plants use water for other purposes as well beyond nutrient absorption, if we focus only on soil fertility it is, by itself, evident that constant presence of ideal water levels is essential for plants to actually be able to access the nutrients present in the soil. Same as with pH levels, the thirteen micronutrients and macronutrients may all be present in perfect amounts, but these two conditions deeply affect whether these nutrients are in a state that is actually useful for plants and, consequently, their keepers. Water content is measured in the percentage of water out of the total weight of a sample of soil, with results that may look like these excellent diagrams from the North Carolina Extension Gardener Handbook: Improving these two conditions passes as well through managing other chemical, physical and biological conditions of the soil, so keep an eye in our blog for future articles on those subjects. In the meantime, happy growing!