Lately I have been listening to a lot of podcasts about wild game habitat management. A new one I have recently found is Jason Snavely's "Droptine Podcast". In this podcast he describes his method of habitat management as Regenerative Wildlife Agriculture, which as the name implies, applies Regenerative Agriculture, practiced by farmers like Gabe Brown, to wildlife habitat management. I recommend everyone who is interested in these ideas check him out as he provides a lot of great ideas and information. Something he talks about a lot in his podcasts is the concept of biomimicry in relation to food production and wildlife habitat management. To me this is an extremely important concept to understand when thinking about where our food comes from and how it is produced and it is what I will focus on in today's post.
Biomimicry is the simple idea of people mimicking nature and natural processes in the things they do. For example, airplanes came from watching birds soar through the sky and velcro mimics the burs of some plants such as burdock that stick to animals as the walk by. Biomimicry shows us that we can observe nature and come up with some amazing ideas that help us in our daily lives. I believe that this concept is especially important in regards to our food production systems and that in general the closer we get to mimicking nature the better off we'll be. Today I'd like to look at different levels of biomimicry in the various ways we produce food in order to understand what each has to offer.
In my diagram above I detail 5 different levels of biomimicry in food production. These levels are not set in stone and there is a lot of overlap, but I think they can help demonstrate these ideas pretty well. On the diagram the amount of biomimicry increases from left to right. On the far left you have the least amount of biomimicry, which would be our system of conventional modern agriculture. Then on the far right you would have the highest amount of biomimicry with subsistence hunting and gathering. I then split the diagram into 2 halves with one side describing animal production and the other plant production. Then below that I describe some basic management characteristics of each level.
On the far left is our system of conventional modern agriculture. This is characterized by factory farming for meat production and conventionally grown crops for plants. This level has the least amount of biomimicry and in my mind is probably the type we would want to avoid the most. At this level we see a very high amount of inputs such as tillage, heavy chemical fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide use, the use of feed lots and large warehouses where livestock are kept and prevented from going outside. These are very unhealthy systems and produce very nutritionally poor food compared to the other levels. This is because the animals are fed an unnatural diet that makes them sick, such as corn fed to cattle and the plant products are grown in very poor soil that is degraded from years of abuse. This is also the least sustainable system because it leads to ecosystem degradation through soil loss and pollution as well as requires chemical inputs from products like petroleum that are non-renewable. Over time if this was the only food production system used then there would eventually be a collapse from one of the links in the chain breaking. The one potential positive aspect of this system is that is it highly efficient for the modern industrial economy and up until this point has been able to lower food prices and bring many people back from the brink of starvation. However, over time the inputs and environmental degradation will only become more costly and eventually we will not be able to sustain this type of production.
The next level is characterized by production systems like pastured livestock and no-till and/or organic crop production. These systems differ from the first in that they tend to produce much healthier food. Livestock are fed more natural diets and they are able to experience fresh air and sunlight. Plants at this level also improve in nutrition because the non-tillage leads to healthier and intact soil that does not degrade as readily and organically grown plants do not suffer the consequences of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, which have been shown to, at least potentially, have health risks for people as well as the soil that they are applied to. At this level we see less environmental degradation and pollution, but it is still not an optimal system and over enough time will still cause some degradation. Livestock at this level are often rotated on a handful of pastures at best or at worst spread out over a single pasture. This type of grazing alters the plant communities on the pasture and leads to the most palatable and nutritious species dying out from overgrazing, which gives an advantage to unpalatable weeds and over time can poison livestock if all that is left is poisonous weeds. To combat this many livestock producers have to perpetually replant their pastures, which over time becomes very costly and labor intensive. In drier more extreme environments this overgrazing leads to desertification as talked about by those like Allan Savory who promote a more holistic approach that can actually reverse desertification and regenerate soils and plant communities. The plant production at this level also can contribute to some environmental degradation and non-optimal nutritional quality because they do not integrate animals into the system or plant poly-cultures, which both improve the soil and contribute to higher nutritional quality. This is what people like Gabe Brown have talked about and improved upon with their more regenerative approach to crop production.
The middle of my diagram is characterized by food production practices that not only are sustainable, but that can regenerate degraded environments. These types of systems are able to produce even healthier food than the last because they mimic nature to an even higher degree. The livestock at this level generally are fed a much healthier diet because they are rotated through many more pastures than more conventional systems. This mimics wild herds of herbivores constantly moving to new pastures due to the presence of predators that push them out of recently grazed areas which helps prevent the over grazing of the most nutritious plants. On the plant production side at this level regenerative farmers use techniques such as cover cropping and animal integration to heal the soil through keeping living plants in the ground as long as possible and maximizing the collection of solar energy as well as providing animal impact and natural fertilization that can help to quickly build up the soil. These systems are very sustainable and regenerate landscapes over time, making them more productive. However, these techniques still require fairly high inputs such as the perpetual need for tractors on the regenerative agriculture side and the need for fencing and livestock rotation systems for holistic livestock management, which both still require a relatively high amount of labor. In my mind these techniques are very valuable, but I still think they could be improved upon with the practice ecosystem design. That being said I think the practices at this level could be used perpetually and would be pretty optimal if they were the most common practices in existence.
The next level is what I refer to as ecosystem design. At this level wild and/or feral animals are used as the main source of meat. This would be the system of meat production that I developed on this blog which I refer to as the "Hunter's Eden" system. In this system one would design an ecosystem that would provide optimal wild game habitat and manage it for a high production of diverse wild game animals. The major benefit of this system would be that once the habitat was established then almost the only labor that would be needed would be to harvest the game. There would be times where one would have to make slight alterations to the habitat, but this would be relatively rare compared to the holistic management of livestock for example. Livestock still need care and infrastructure from people in order to be a productive source of food, whereas wildlife can survive and thrive without any human interference at all. For plant production this level would be characterized by the permaculture concept of a "food forest" For this system one would design an ecosystem with plants that are edible to people including the different levels of a forest such as the tree, shrub, vine, ground-cover and root layers. These ecosystems would be comprised of mainly perennials and self seeding annuals that would continue perpetually with only minimal maintenance such as trimming plants that are blocking out too much sun on the lower layers. While these systems probably couldn't match the production and efficiency of the previous level I think most would probably be surprised at how productive these systems could be and if needed I think they would be able to feed the current global population and then some. Ultimately I believe that a mixture between the systems at the previous level and this one would be optimal for society as a whole.
On the far right of my diagram is the level of subsistence hunting and gathering. The obvious major benefit to this level is all you would need to do is harvest. No maintenance or management required. This is the food production system that humans are designed for. If modern civilization collapses this would likely be the most viable option for one to survive. Hunting and foraging is the last option we have if we lose everything else. It is the foundational food system if all else fails. Obviously, however, if everyone were forced to hunt and forage all their food then we would wipe out many plants and animals pretty quickly. This is because our influence around the globe has led nature to be pretty unproductive. The bison were nearly wiped out. The fish in the ocean have been severely over-fished. And wild plants have been destroyed through agriculture an urban expansion. And even if we were able to restore wild plant and animal populations, we would still end up wiping them out again if we were to stop our maintenance and management of the natural world completely. That's why ultimately living off a pure hunter-gatherer lifestyle would be unsustainable. Luckily we know how to maintain and manage natural ecosystems. It is some of the knowledge that we have learned over our long existence on this earth and if we put those ideas to practice I think we can create a bountiful world that eliminates starvation and maintains an eden-like level of abundance perpetually into the future.
