I’m a wine critic and author with 30 years of tasting and fieldwork experience. It was the changing taste of my favourite wines that brought me to climate change, I founded The Wine and Climate Institute in Oxford (www.twacci.org) in 2016, after having published my first book on wine and climate change in 2014. This blog contains extracts from my UN research, my talks, articles and books, and it is all about wine, climate change, freshwater management, the water and earth sciences, coastal and maritime cultures such as the Vikings and the Saami, Northern issues, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and TEK, etc. Basically, all things Water and anything else that interests me. My greatest hope is to be part of the solution.

November 28, 2022

Water conservation starts in the dirt ... Agroforestry, RA, and crop suitability

November 28, 2022/ Linda Johnson-Bell

The most effective way in which to improve water conservation is to improve soil health. This is one of the aims of both Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Regenerative Agriculture (RA). A note: Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices, a subset of Regenerative Agriculture, whilst important, have as their aim to make soil more resilient to climate change events. Regenerative Agriculture goes one step further and has as its aim to renew and restore degraded soil. Soil is the home of water.

The part that soil plays in water management is greatly underestimated and misunderstood. When soil is healthy and retains all the water that it can, then costs go down, and yields increase (naturally) as does income (Hawken 2017 - read his ‘Drawdown’). All soils are composed of the same basic materials: air, water, mineral particles, and organic matter It is the proportions of these ingredients that vary and create the different soil profiles (O’Hare 1988). Decaying organic matter, or humus, is where the water and carbon (60%) are held. Farming practices that assist in protecting and renewing soil health and aid water and nutrient retention are those such as biodiversity, diverse cover crops, diverse and indigenous trees, no-tilling, and no chemicals.

Critical to protecting soil health is allowing it to live in a biodiverse environment. This means having indigenous trees that “act like lungs” (agroforestry). They give shade, provide livestock fodder, act as drought protection, provide firewood, provide leaves for mulch, and aid in soil regeneration (Hawken 2016:119). View trees as assets, as a capital expenditure with healthy returns (Schumacher 2011). Biodiversity allows a natural habitat to function in sync. Every plant will have more than one purpose and will complement the function of its neighbour. An example of what this looks like is Kristen Krash’s cacao plantation in Ecuador.

A biodiverse paradise

I had the pleasure of talking to Kristen Krash and am a great admirer of her work. She is the director of the Sueño de Vida Regenerative Farm in the cloud forest zone of northwest Ecuador. Since 2016, Kristen and her partner Juan have been regenerating degraded land via agroforestry. By implementing time-tested, indigenous methods proven to build soil fertility, create wildlife habitat, and produce optimal yields (as opposed to maximum yields), Kristen and Juan have transformed barren cow pastures into lush and productive secondary forests featuring Ecuador's famed heirloom indigenous cacao variety, Aroma Nacional. According to Krash, weeds, along with banana and plantain, are nature’s pioneer plants because they rapidly cover bare soil and begin performing helpful ecological functions. Weeds jump-start the system by protecting the soil from erosion and replenishing organic matter. Then, by planting different heights of indigenous trees, they produce different heights of canopies that perform different roles thus creating an eco-system where everything has multi-functions. Banana, plantain, and mango are neighbour trees that shelter the cacao from the wind and disease-carrying moulds and keep the soil and undergrowth moist.

“Irrigation can’t do that. Not even drip irrigation can mimic nature and the sort of moisture that is needed” Krash explains. The banana leaves fall to the ground and act as mulch and weed control. Such activity attracts the birds that eat the insects. “All of this is for free, and I don’t need pesticides, fertilisers, or herbicides” (Krash 2022). She laments the idea of there having been acres of cow pastures on her land before she bought it. “What about crop suitability? What was a cow pasture doing in a subtropical rainforest? They need a meadow or a savannah” (Krash 2022). Further, she then plants turmeric and cardamom under the cacao, creating a three-tiered system that creates additional revenue streams. This is reminiscent of the Native American “Three Sisters” system where corn, beans, and squash are grown together. The corn stalks hold up the beans and the squash is ground cover and eventually, mulch.

Crop Suitability as a resource manager

Biodiverse, indigenously planted, regenerative, and organic farming systems are the solution to sustaining ecological and economic wealth. These systems use ten times less water than chemical systems (Shiva 2016). Another farming practice that substantially contributes to a healthy and sustainable ecosystem is crop suitability. This term is often absent from the narrative or coupled with the discussion on indigenous plantings. Crop suitability is about matching a plant to its optimal ecological habitat. Nature does this easily for us: Vitis vinifera is indigenous to southwest Asia near the Caspian Sea, nestled in the Caucasus mountains. Having wandered far from home, the grapevine is still most suited to a relatively narrow geographical and climatic range; most often in mid-latitude regions that are prone to high climatic variability (between 30 degrees NS and 50 degrees NS latitude). But when brought overseas to the much warmer and drier climates of the New World, and subjected to the mechanisation of chemical conventional farming, the plant struggles. Cacao is native to the Amazonian rainforests and prefers a temperature between 18-32℃ with no direct sunlight or winds, yet today, half of the world’s chocolate is grown in Africa, in Ghana, and on the Ivory Coast. Sugarcane is native to tropical Asia yet is also grown in sub-Saharan Africa. Tobacco is indigenous to Argentina, yet the world’s largest producer is China. Even rice paddies are being grown in California’s Sacramento Valley, with flood irrigation.

The act of growing crops outside of their natural habitats is taking them out of their self-sustaining system. When they are taken out of these systems and grown as a monoculture, this false habitat then has to be manufactured for them, disrupting whichever ecosystem to which they have been moved. They can pose a threat to the indigenous species in the displaced habitat. (Vandana) Shiva provides a good example of this. The story of sugarcane in India in the 1970s began when the World Bank subsidised mechanical water withdrawal systems which ushered in an explosion of sugarcane plantations in Maharashtra just as it was hit hard by drought. The sugarcane fields literally converted groundwater into a commodity and left people and staple food crops thirsty for water. Sugarcane is only cultivated in 3% of this district but consumes 80% of the irrigation water and eight times more than other irrigated crops. Ironically, as the state was struggling with famine, the sugarcane sector was flourishing. Today, the water is gone (2016).

Fundamentally, one can say that Traditional Ecological Knowledge finds its origins in crop suitability. In the past, indigenous cultures predominantly consumed what was grown where they lived with additional forays into small-scale crop cultivations within a biodiverse system. The ecological unbalance was triggered not so much when cultivation commenced, but rather, when cultivation of non-indigenous crops became the dominant system, and this system was then further subjected to both intensive and chemical farming methods.

LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute

www.twacci.org