By Allyn Gaestel
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| Agroforestry (Photo courtesy Maya Mountain Research Farm) |
As the weather becomes more unpredictable, so does crop yield and food security. Typical monoculture farms can lose entire harvests to drought or unexpected storms. Local communities bear witness to these changes and difficulties, and the Maya Mountain Research Farm is addressing climate change and food security head on.
MMRF is a small functioning farm and training center for farmers. It utilizes biologically diverse techniques as an alternative to large-scale monoculture farms. This positively impacts the environment as well as improving food security.
Monoculture, or the single crop system of farming, is a widespread farming technique used by agribusinesses around the world. These systems tend to be easy victims of climate change, and also contribute to it through heavy emissions and environmental degradation.
Single crop systems leach the soil of nutrients without having a system of soil rehabilitation built in, requiring the use of destructive chemical fertilizers. The excessive dependence on petroleum for each step of the farming process in large-scale farms also increases greenhouse gas emissions. These farms power their process with oil, from importing seeds and tilling the ground, to harvesting and exporting products.
Alternatively, MMRF attempts to create a sustainable eco-system on the farm. Agroforestry is the integration of trees into a farm’s eco-system. Christopher Nesbitt, director of MMRF, described to MediaGlobal how agroforestry combats climate change. “Agroforestry can replicate many of the ecological functions and services of an intact ecosystem—carbon sequestration, soil retention, soil moisture retention, habitat creation—while being human centered and meeting the needs of the farmer and his/her community,” he said.
MMRF uses what’s called a stacked polyculture system of farming. Nesbitt explained, “Such systems are very resilient against both infirmities and market fluctuation.” With numerous plant species on the farm, if one crop fails due to disease or diminished yield, other crops provide a safety net. Also, harvests occur at different times, so there is always something ready to be utilized or marketed without excessively straining the soil.
MMRF offers an important service by training farmers in alternative farming techniques. With a functioning farm as their training center farmers are able to gain hands on experience working with them. And while polyculture farming is not difficult, it takes commitment.
According to Nesbitt, “This is not difficult to do, but requires a great degree of ‘systems literacy,’ time, enough surplus to enable medium and long term work, and access to material. Training helps!”
While agroforestry seems to provide an obvious alternative to monoculture farming, the biggest advantage monoculture has is scale. Despite all its positive aspects, it can be difficult to expand a small sustainable farming system into a larger enterprise. Nesbitt described, “Any attempt to scale that model up would require a very skilled labor force, and would probably favor the production of a single export market oriented crop, like cacao or coffee. The amount of species you can monitor and manage is inversely proportionate to the acreage under management. More acres will mean less species.”
However, even if agroforestry is not a useful model for large-scale agribusinesses, small farmers do not have to confine themselves to their immediate locality. By organizing several small farms into cooperatives, farmers can participate in the global market. Groups of small-scale farmers can pool their harvests to sell, making a large enough output to act as an alternative to agro-business or plantations.
