Rachel Schulman
Image courtesy of Cascadian Farm via a Creative Commons license.
T
he question of what separates agroecological farming from organic farming is a valid one and often asked.
Although agroecological farming
shares some of the same principles as organic
farming, agroecology is not associated with a
particular type of agriculture. Conventional
and organic farms alike can take an agroecological approach to managing farmland.
Agroecological farming strives to create stable
food production systems that are resilient to
environmental perturbations such as climate
change and disease. The only way to achieve
this goal is to go beyond thinking of farms as
linear systems in which inputs (acreage, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) influence output (food
yield), and start treating farmland as complex
webs of ecological interactions.
What is agroecology?
Is organic food agroecological?
Agroecology views agriculture from an ecological perspective. Farmland, after all, is an
ecosystem – a complex network in which every living and nonliving component of the system affects every other component, either directly or indirectly.
This ecosystem view of agriculture considers
all of the services provided by farmland to humans – soil health, water quality, air quality,
pest control, disease control, biodiversity, and
so forth – in addition to food production.
Not necessarily. Most of the organic food you
see in the grocery store is from industrial operations that do not think ecologically. Instead of managing their farmland as ecosystems, large-scale organic farms focus solely on
producing as much food as possible.
Sure, big organic farms don’t use synthetic
chemicals, but they do little to manage the
ecosystem services provided by farmland.
They rely heavily on fossil fuels, erode soils,
pollute water supplies, destroy native wildlife
habitat, and so forth. Intensive agriculture –