I call this Whole Systems Agriculture and I think it goes beyond other systems of alternative agriculture and is where agriculture will be heading in the century to come. I practice no-till, and like Ruth Stout keep a permanent organic mulch on the ground. The greatest benefit is in the area of pest and disease control but there are other benefits. When reduced to a method, it makes market gardening possible for people more ordinary cognitive ability and in principle makes a new agrarian era possible. The laughable thing about the sustainable agriculture movment today is that you need a PhD to be a market gardener if one is to understand the material put out by the universities about family-scale agriculture.
Systems thinking makes intensive knowledge unnecessary.
But it's pretty lonely out here. I became interested in systems 15 years ago when I read Fritjof Capra's book, 'The Turning Point'. I call this Whole Systems Agriculture and I think it goes beyond other systems of alternative agriculture and is where agriculture will be heading in the century to come. I practice no-till, and like Ruth Stout keep a permanent organic mulch on the ground. The greatest benefit is in the area of pest and disease control but there are other benefits.