Published in Permaculture Design Magazine issue #95, Spring 2015

 

2.78 million square miles. That’s how much of the Earth’s surface is devoted to the production of annual cereal crops like rice, wheat and corn[1]. That’s about the same size as the entire country of Australia, and is more than four times larger than all the land devoted to growing perennials – such as fruits, nuts, coffee and rubber – combined [2].

You’ve already heard the litany of woes this arrangement is creating: surpluses that incentivize food processors to conjure grotesque substances out of soy protein and corn syrup. Trillions of empty calories that make us feel sated, but end up slowly sapping our vitality with obesity and diabetes. Armies of migrant farmworkers coerced into a 21st-century indentured servitude. Nitrogen blooms that kill entire marine ecosystems. The list goes on and on.

Given these conditions, it’s no surprise that more and more attention is turning towards perennial crops as a more sustainable source of food. As compared to our current system, perennials offer a multitude of environmental and nutritional advantages:

• Perennials are less work. With the elimination of yearly requirements to buy seed, plant and till, most perennials require far less ongoing maintenance than annuals.
• Perennials meet more needs with less processing. Sure, corn and soy can now be manipulated into all kinds of “frankenfoods”, as well as plastic and biofuel, thanks to genetic engineering and energy-intensive processing. But perennials can serve all these needs and more without the labs and factories. Nearly all climates are able to support dozens of perennials that, when combined, can meet most of our needs for protein, carbohydrates and medicine – not to mention timber, fiber, and other industrial uses.
• Perennials build soil. Topsoil is, by volume, the single largest export of the United States – and once it blows or erodes away, it can take hundreds of years to rebuild. Not only do perennials reduce erosion by holding soil with a long-term root network, they can accelerate the soil-building process with the proper species selection and management techniques.
• Perennials need less fertility. Less nutrients are required for most perennials to produce a good yield, lessening the need for fertilizer inputs.
• Perennials are more resilient. With their deeper root systems, perennials tend to be more resilient in the face of drought, heat, and cold.

All in all, we’ve amassed a convincing body of evidence demonstrating that perennial-based food production systems could yield enough to feed a planet of nine billion, sequester enough carbon to stop climate change in its tracks, restore fertility to our soils, reduce fertilizer inputs, and weather an increasingly erratic climate.

And yet, in the places where it counts, the focus on annual monoculture remains as strong as ever. In our legislative chambers, federal policy continues to subsidize a select few commodity crops to the tune of billions of dollars per year. At research institutes, plant scientists center their work on genetic engineering and ever-more-baroque means of battling pests. And on the ground, more and more farmland continues to fall into the hands of speculators and the agribiz multinationals, for whom long-term ecological health is hardly worth a thought.

How can we be so short-sighted? What could possibly compel us to double down on annual agriculture, even as the evidence in favor of perennials mounts?

Well, practically speaking, there are some real logistical challenges to transitioning to perennial crops. To truly turn around our global food system, millions of farmers would need to be re-trained in how to perform their life’s work. Tens of millions of acres of cropland would need to be painstakingly redesigned and reconfigured, with thoughtful attention to climate, terrain, and soil. And, crucially, each farm would need to wait at least a few years for its perennial crops to start yielding. With most farmers already in debt or barely breaking even, very few could afford to wait that long until a new system comes onboard.

Of course, these challenges could theoretically be overcome with the right financing systems, intelligent tax policy and the like, but the political will is decidedly lacking to make that happen. The invisible structures of society at large are, in fact, generally opposed to such forward-thinking solutions. Our economic, political and monetary systems are all designed to favor the needs of right now over those of future generations – and as long as they remain that way, the quick fix will always win. The annual will outcompete the perennial, even if it means sacrificing the well-being of future generations.

And perhaps that’s not a coincidence. Perhaps these two elements of our global culture – annual agriculture and a growth-obsessed, short-term focus – are more intimately connected that we think. It’s well-understood, of course, that our cultural priorities shape the way we grow our food; everything from local laws to diet fads have implications on what crops are grown and where they are sold. But I’d like to suggest that the reverse is also true – that the way we grow our food shapes our cultural priorities. And it does so in ways that are far more subtle and far-reaching than we might initially imagine.

In a world that’s been subsisting largely off the same vegetables and cereal grains for thousands of years, annuals are like the proverbial water that we fish can hardly notice. But by examining how annual agriculture ended up as our dominant food source, we can get a glimpse at how its effects have spread far beyond the dinner plate. And by comparing these insights with the distinct cultural practices of pre-agricultural societies, we can start to sketch out some characteristics of what a post-agricultural society might look like.

To begin with, let’s recap how we ended up a species of grain farmers in the first place. History books tend to start their story with the invention of agriculture some 12,000 years ago, with everything else relegated to a footnote called “pre-history”. In truth, though, our modern bodies and brains were in place tens of thousands of years before agriculture came on the scene[3]. Language, clothing, artistic expression, and complex spiritual systems had all been around for many millennia, and as humans spread to nearly every ecosystem on the planet, we developed an astonishingly wide variety of means for securing our sustenance. Beyond merely relying on what nature provided, these pre-agricultural societies actively engaged with the ecosystems around them through strategies like selective foraging, elimination of competitive pests and predators, seed scattering, and controlled burns.

As the wild temperature fluctuations of the ice ages gave way to a warmer and more stable climate, pastoralists in the fertile river valleys of the Middle East and China happened upon a positive feedback loop of such strategies, focused on a select few species of adaptable plants and animals. It’s unlikely that any of these strategies were chosen deliberately; the process happened slowly enough that any given generation may not have noticed much of a difference from the one before. But over the course of a thousand years or so, these incremental tweaks had resulted in a sea change in how food was procured.

Whereas the techniques of other cultures involved a web of complex, mutualistic relationships with dozens of species, this new arrangement simplified diets and ecosystems alike, concentrating on the narrow window of plants and animals that responded most quickly to human manipulation. Whereas perennial-based systems kept calories stored in the living biomass of trees and shrubs until needed, annual monocultures locked those calories in seeds that were kept in large granaries after harvest. And whereas many non-agricultural diets were centered around raw food, agricultural diets necessitated the cooking and milling of grains to make them edible.

The net result was an unprecedented ability to capture and store caloric energy. With that energy safely stored, permanent settlement became possible. And like sugar released into a bacterial colony, surplus energy propelled the population of those settlements to unprecedented heights. You’ve probably heard how the story goes from here: population growth allowed many people to be freed from the drudgery of procuring their own food, leading to division of labor, the development of writing, government, wheels, and all the rest.

Well, not quite. Thousands of years into agriculture’s emergence, in fact, its dominance as humanity’s primary form of sustenance was hardly assured. As a growing cadre of anthropologists and historians have pointed out, agriculture didn’t actually offer immediate advantages to the well-being of its practitioners. Compared to their pastoral and horticultural counterparts, agriculturalists were shorter in stature and nutrient-deficient, worked more hours to secure their food, and suffered from many more diseases (the latter being a result of their cohabitation with domesticated animals). What’s more, the consequences of agricultural life seem to have been incompatible with our existing social structures and belief systems – at least at first. Recent archaeological evidence[4] points to a pattern of “boom and bust” following the beginnings of annual-plant-based lifestyles: in multiple parts of the globe, the earliest agricultural societies in a given region collapsed after settlements reached a couple thousand people, and didn’t re-emerge for centuries.

In a 2000 article in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, University of Notre Dame anthropologist Ian Kuijt hypothesizes that invisible structures were the culprit of this boom-and-bust pattern[5]. Kuijt notes that early agricultural settlements such as Çatalhöyük in Turkey seem to have been “flat” societies like the ones that preceded them: merely a large collection of permanent homes, they had no apparent centers of government, commerce, or religion. After these early settlements fell apart, it took hundreds of years for a “second wave” of agricultural settlements to emerge. Once they did, however, they exhibited the well-documented seedlings of today’s hierarchical structures: things like social classes, the rule of law, armies, prisons, and organized religion.

Kuijt’s implication is that annual-based agriculture was simply not viable without this suite of new invisible structures to keep it going – namely, a stratified society enforced by strict record-keeping and, frequently, physical violence. By compelling agriculturalists to guard their surplus grain in the centers of large, permanent settlements, monocrops set in motion a chain of events that led inevitably to the force-based hierarchies that have been part and parcel of every successful civilization since.

Another recent study – this one published last year in Science – reinforces the idea that how we grow our food shapes the kind of society we become. In this study, psychologist Thomas Talhelm and his colleagues compared the cultural orientations between two parts of China: the north, where wheat is the historical staple crop, and the south, where rice is more predominant. Since rice paddies require complex, village-wide irrigation systems that necessitate cooperation within a community, Talhelm hypothesized that people from rice-growing areas would see themselves differently than those who grew wheat, which takes much less cooperation to plant and harvest. Indeed, after testing over 1000 people on either side of the rice-wheat border, the researchers found that “a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world.” [6]

If differences in societal values this profound can be traced back to growing two different annual staple crops, just imagine the kinds of philosophical differences between a society of annual growers and one based on perennials. Actually, imagination isn’t even necessary – just a careful look at the cultures where perennial-based food systems managed to flourish well into the agricultural age. While they exhibit a wide variety of religious beliefs, marriage customs, and other behaviors, these societies are notable for what they all lack: hierarchical social classes, armies, or other highly-stratified institutions.

To bring things back to our present predicament, then: where does all this leave us? Are we doomed to a world of violence and war as long as we grow annual grains? Does a society based around perennial polycultures mean living in settlements of less than 200? Well, not necessarily. With the right strategies to manage both topsoil and population, for instance, we may be able to “have our wheat and eat it, too”. And we currently have the knowledge and tools to manifest food forests that support much larger populations than any previous culture.

The point, then, isn’t to draw sweeping generalizations about where we need to go – but instead to ask the right questions that will get us there. Questions like, “How does my own engagement with producing and consuming food shape the way I see the world?” Or “what kinds of invisible structures would need to be in place to convert millions of acres to perennial crops?”  As we continue to ask these questions, one thing remains clear: until we come to terms with our dependence on annual crops, the cycles of exploitation and strife of the last 12,000 years will continue to repeat. Our efforts to build a just and equal society will be in vain without a revolution in how we grow. And that revolution is unlikely to be initiated by the very institutions that annual agriculture made possible.

[1] Source: UDSA Foreign Agricultural Service

[2] Source: The World Bank

[3] Jared Diamond, Daniel Quinn, and the permaculture movement’s own Toby Hemenway have argued these points in great detail in their work over the last 30 years.

[4] Newitz, Analee. “How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization.” iO9 Magazine, November 2014

[5] Kuijt, Ian. “People and Space in Early Agricultural Villages: Exploring Daily Lives, Community Size, and Architecture in the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 19, 75–102 2000.

[6] Talhelm, T. et al, “Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture”, Science Vol. 344 no. 6184, pp. 603-608