This year we saw temperatures across Canada all over the map. This wrecked havoc on our garden as well as farms right across Canada. On the macro level if this is going to become a more regular occurrence this may start to affect the overall food supply. Here in Southern Alberta farms were unable to get a grain crop off the fields this year. The erratic weather here in Albert weather was expressed as a truncation of the growing season. This took the form of snow in spring on frozen ground when we would expect rain and snow in the fall when we would expect dry. All of this set growers large and small up for failure, but it does not have to be this way.

The core of the problem is that humans rely on the production of crops that require a predictable, stable climate within a narrow range of variability. Unfortunately for the crops that we tend to grow, nature/weather is a giant system that is constantly in flux; ecologists call this dynamic stability. This means that nature try’s to remain in a form of fluctuating stasis which accounts for some if not all of this erratic weather from year to year. If the climate starts to de-stabilize this paradigm of growing is going to come under severe pressure and we are going to need a lot more sophistication than just genetic manipulation to ensure that there is a stable food supply. This article is about some of the approaches we can take to manage this uncertainty.

The Prime Driver of The Current Food System

Humans for the last 12,000 years have been gardening (I am using gardening as an analogy to all food production) the planet in various forms and scales and have benefited from the thawing and relative stability that has come after the last ice age, the Younger Dryas.

The current interpretation of the archaeological record indicates that humans started innovating agrarian methodologies shortly after the last ice age out of necessity. The scholar Yuval Hurarri states in Sapiens that some archaeologists believe that the global human population got “as low as 1000” due to food insecurity which was one of the prime drivers toward agriculture. Depending on what you believe and have observed over the past decade we may be coming into a similar pinch point however our population is much larger than 1000, so the stakes are a little higher. Even if you don’t subscribe to climate change, growing food, in a way that does not take geological time into account is like playing Russian roulette. The geological records tell us that the climate is always shifting and these shifts can be quite extreme. If it is essential for the human experiment to continue should we not garden with geological intelligence in mind?

A New Approach to Gardening Earth

Taking geology into account, the primary nugget of information that we should be instilling into the design of human food systems is that of adaptability. The study of deep time shows this to be true, and so this should be one of the primary design constraints into the design of our small and large-scale food systems.

As an aside, if you were going to build a non-adaptive food system that would not be able to cope with climatic volatility you would;

grow millions of acres of monocrop fields

breed grazing animals to live on grain grown in monocrop fields

allow multinationals to own all of the genetic variability produced over the last 4 billion years so that they can invest it into their you proprietary seed

view weeds as a threat and not as nature trying to increase diversity and adapt to changing weather

encourage the majority of the global population to live out of grocery stores and not to grow their own food

reduce the global population of farmers below 3%

move from perennials in all species to annuals

mineralize the carbon in the soil through the use of fertilizer, agrochemicals and tillage

build a food system where the majority of the products are derivatives from 3 crops of corn, soy and wheat all which require climate stability

A resilient and adaptive food system would thus be the opposite of this and would stand a far better chance of providing food in a climatic regime that is far more volatile than the one we currently exist within. To me it matters not if you believe in climate change, we know, according to copious amounts of geology that the climate will change in time, why not build a food system that benefits and thrives from this inevitability now.

Thus, an adaptive food system would

grow millions of acres of polycultural crops in fashion similar to Gabe Brown

breed grazing animals to live graze and turn all types of vegetative matter into proteins and fats including weeds.

require the life companies to open source any genetically engineered seed they create following the example of the open source software movement and require the careful use of the scientific method before new seeds are released.

view weeds as learning opportunities and signals that show us how nature is adapting

encourage the return to backyard and community gardening. Change the view of grocery stores as a backstop measure not a primary food source.

create policies that encourage farmers to return to the land and incentivize specific farming practices that are cliamte adaptive

encourage the integration of perennial grasses, herbs, forbes, shrubs and trees into annual systems.

incentivize farming practices that run similar principles to farms like Gabe Browns

build a food system where diversity is encouraged

J.Russell Smith does a great job of describing what a new type of agriculture based on similar concepts described above might look like.

One last strategy to weather the storm

Canmore Community Strawbale Passive Solar Greenhouse

The idea for this article came to me as a result of a plethora of consulting inquiries on greenhouses that I have recently received. These greenhouse inquiries all had one commonality, climate adaptation. It appears that the people that are currently gardening or aware of the climatic variability have started recognizing that they may need to shelter some of their more sensitive crops throughout the year to ensure a harvest. Interestingly these potential clients have connected this idea with greenhouses. Greenhouses represent an additional option outside of the ones stated above that could increase climate adaptability by being able to control the weather inside of the space regardless of the weather outside. House manufacturers could start including a food appliance like a passive solar greenhouse as part of the home construction. These same developers that community recreation facilities, community centres and playgrounds in new subdivisions could build larger scale passive solar greenhouses as a community “amenity” within a climate adaptive subdivision. These larger greenhouses could act as the local grocery store for herbs, vegetables and even some proteins potentially. We know from World War II that the victory garden produced close to 50% of the food in backyards during the war. Adding a greenhouse to the backyard or community would add food security with climate insurance at the same time.

Free Introduction to Passive Solar Greenhouse Design

We have recently launched our free introduction to passive solar greenhouse design. It is a 30-minute video that explains the process of greenhouse design in an easy to follow video. If you are interested in taking this course you can sign up here.

Rob’s Bio:

In less than ten years, Rob Avis left Calgary’s oil fields and retooled his engineering career to help clients and students design integrated systems for shelter, energy, water, waste and food, all while supporting local economy and regenerating the land. He’s now leading the next wave of permaculture education, teaching career-changing professionals to become eco-entrepreneurs with successful regenerative businesses. Learn more and connect with Rob at https://vergepermaculture.ca/contact/