Five major perks of agricultural heritage systems

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Five Major Perks Of Agricultural Heritage Systems
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.
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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.
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They Serve As Experimental Cases Of Study.
According to a 2011 FAO booklet, agricultural
heritage systems are also live experiment grounds
from which the 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."
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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