Biomimicry in food production - an introduction to ‘the project’

This blog was started with a particular purpose in mind, though it may digress from that purpose in time. That purpose was to discuss my thoughts on a series of papers I have been reading, which discuss different ways of looking at food production systems. Before I dive in, I wanted to talk a bit more about the genesis and intent of this project and what I'm hoping to do in this online space.

Biomimicry and permaculture give me warm fuzzy feelings

One of my old friends and  I have been talking about science for a long time - over ten years, now. During one visit, we got to talking about one of my favorite ideas that I’ve been longing to do something with - biomimicry. 

Having read ‘the’ book (Biomimicry by Benyus) several times, I find my mind keeps returning to the idea of biomimicry in agriculture. The chapter in the book focuses on a particular group - the Land Institute, whose founder I have since seen speak in person. They endeavor to grow food ‘like a prairie’. I find this idea - essentially, that of localized permaculture - innately appealing. The first time I read the chapter, I immediately began to wonder about how you take something so locally specific and transfer the principles - in the Pacific Northwest, would we grow food like a forest? What might that look like? (some temperate, less flammable version of the later part of this talk, perhaps?)

The more I thought about it, the more I got excited. I realized that I want to believe this permaculture approach might be 'the one'. It seems like it should be far more sustainable - emulating existing ecosystems seems like it must be better than tromping over them with mono-cultures, pesticides, and fertilizers. We would be reconnecting to the world we live in at the same time we grow food! The whole concept just seems elegant, beautiful - it speaks to me on an aesthetic and emotional level. It 'feels' right. 

But can you measure it?

My inner rational empiricist finds this talk of grand ideas and feelings troublesome. She wants facts, data, measurements - oh, and also, concrete plans on 'how this even works' would be nice too. She asks me: How do we scale a permaculture approach? Can it even begin to compete with conventional or even large-scale organic agriculture? How on earth do you measure that, when a permaculture farming approach is so different from even an organic farming approach? (multi-crop vs. single crop in one ‘field’, more complex harvesting, longer time to get set up, many other things) And when you get down to it what are you even measuring? Just yields? But isn’t part of the point that there’s more to farming than just the crop you produce? What's more? How can you collect data on it? (I’ll talk more about this in my next post, where I grappled with this issue far more than I thought I would.)

My friend and I are both scientists at heart, though he currently practices more than I do. We both agreed that somehow, the potential of permaculture must be measurable, complex though it might be. We just weren’t sure how to get there - and for all we knew, someone had made good progress on this question already! 

A research project is born

We decided that perhaps the best thing we could do was just start digging through the literature and reading about how other systems of agriculture have been analyzed and compared what literature existed on permaculture, and anything else relevant we could find. Perhaps we could then build a working knowledge which we could use as a jumping off point to do some writing and researching of our own.

We’ve been reading through the papers we found in our first search ever since then. We didn't have luck finding anyone who had specifically compared permaculture with conventional or organic agriculture, so we decided to broaden our search to 'how do you analyze/compare various forms of food production (ideally, with sustainability as a factor)'. We then planned to figure out how those ideas and concepts might be extended to talk about permaculture. It's a bit of an odd assortment of articles, and I'm sure our various searches missed some other relevant items, but it's a starting point.

Here, I hope to ‘think out loud’ through what I’ve been reading and thinking - what’s interested me, what has confused me, and what has gotten me really excited. And, while someday I might like to pull these thoughts together into a coherent, analytical form, for now I relish the opportunity to put these thoughts down in a slightly less... formal tone. (though hopefully still thoughtful and interesting.) Scientific literature is expected to be written with an audience of only other scientists (and often only in the same field), which can make it opaque to a lot of people who might otherwise be interested. While I understand why that's the case, it bothered me back when I was in astrophysics and it still bothers me now. My hope is that any of my friends and family might be able to read these posts and come away with at least a decent understanding of what I am talking about.

Sources

Here’s the list of papers we are starting with, in case anyone should find this blog interesting enough to want to read along. Hopefully we’ll add much more before this is done.

Eline de Backer, Joris Aertsens, Sofie Vergucht, Walter Steurbaut, (2009) "Assessing the ecological soundness of organic and conventional agriculture by means of life cycle assessment (LCA): A case study of leek production", British Food Journal, Vol. 111 Iss: 10, pp.1028 - 1061

Ika Darnhofer, Thomas Lindenthal, Ruth Bartel-Kratochvil and Werner Zollitsch. “Conventionalisation of organic farming practices: from structural criteria towards an assessment based on organic principles. A review.” Agron. Sustain. Dev. 30 (1) 67-81 (2010)

Schau EM, Fet AM (2008): LCA Studies of Food Products as Background for Environmental Product Declarations. Int J LCA 13 (3) 255–264

Ivan Muñoz & Llorenç Milà i Canals & Amadeo R. Fernández-Alba; "Life cycle assessment of the average Spanish diet including human excretion." Int J Life Cycle Assess (2010) 15:794–805

Holzschuh, A., Steffan-Dewenter, I. and Tscharntke, T. (2008), Agricultural landscapes with organic crops support higher pollinator diversity. Oikos, 117: 354–361.

Gareth Edwards-Jones, Llorenç Milà i Canals, Natalia Hounsome, Monica Truninger, Georgia Koerber, Barry Hounsome, Paul Cross, Elizabeth H. York, Almudena Hospido, Katharina Plassmann, Ian M. Harris, Rhiannon T. Edwards, Graham A.S. Day, A. Deri Tomos, Sarah J. Cowell, David L. Jones, Testing the assertion that ‘local food is best’: the challenges of an evidence-based approach, Trends in Food Science & Technology, Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2008, Pages 265-274, ISSN 0924-2244

Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews; “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States.” Environmental Science & Technology 2008 42 (10), 3508-3513