David Rauschenbach

The Agropolis Farm website presents a concept for regional, community-level farming. It provides an interesting and attractive visualization of a produce market that brings food one step closer to consumers. This represents an improvement in freshness and quality, a reduction in transportation, and a way to address largely untapped market demands for food distribution systems which empower consumers to directly supervise their food production supply lines.

Local is good

The local food movement is in full swing, and represents an unstoppable shift away from flavorless foods that are bred for durability, harvested before ripeness, and are, in large part, missing 1/3 of their vitamins and minerals, as well as nearly all of their natural flavor, which is why kids and adults alike would rather not touch them.

Decades of abuses have created an ever-growing consumer demand for the ability to personally supervise the manner in which their food is grown. And this is an extremely good thing. For example, I would never be satisfied with aquaculture or aeroculture foods, because I personally believe that no amount of clever behavior can compensate for depriving a plant of healthy living soil. I just don't see the point, and I absolutely hate fruits, vegetables, and nuts that all taste like cardboard. But other people might not care about that, which is why I support the concept of the Agropolis regional produce store, because of the consumer empowerment that it represents.

Since there are so many variations possible when it comes to these models, I analyze the Agropolis solution from my own point of view, which will no doubt lead to my own variation on the theme one day, once I meet up with enough people that agree with me, versus some other plan in the grand scheme of healthy and diverse humanity.

The soil is our enemy (says who?)

“AGROPOLIS is a concept for the next wave of hydroponic, aeroponic, aquaponic farming — growing vegetables without the use of soil.” — excerpt from Agropolis "Our Solution" page

I wonder when the soil first became the enemy of agriculture. Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that it is treated as an enemy. Here are some examples:

• Topsoil is washed into the ocean through practices like monoculture farming, a lack of trees (less than 3% of surface area per farm in North America), and tilling, causing desertification by destroying the soil's ability to slow down the path of water.
• Farmers carpet-bomb their soil with poison, ensuring the soil remans dead and free of microbial activity, further locking the land into desertification.
• Irrigated lands become salt beds, after enough years of irrigation, because water likes to carry minerals, and when the water evaporates, the minerals are left behind. Therefore, irrigation is another pattern for desertification. The San Joaquin Valley, once referred to as "the most productive unnatural environment on Earth" (Wikipedia), holds the proof.

Prior peak empires have also coincided with a depletion of the topsoil, which is a massive wealth destruction event that creates a subsequent demand for credit to cover the loss of wealth which represents the progressive decline in agricultural yields. In the US, it started big when the government interfered with the free market by subsidizing agriculture, causing farmers to cut down most of their trees, which destroyed the soil's ability to retain water and slow the wind. This resulted in a new level of tornados and flooding, greater need for irrigation, 10 degree hotter summers, and the loss of up to 18 feet of topsoil, which washes into the sea at a rate of over 400,000 tons/day through the Mississippi River Delta, alone.

Additionally, there is a strong argument to be made that the demand for pesticides was also caused by the US subsidy of Ag, which caused the trees to be chopped down, shifting bird populations away from crops, because birds only de-bug plants within a certain distance of the protection of the forest, which I confirmed with my own eyes in Indiana. Furthermore, monoculture cropping begets monoculture pest problems, because of the law of attraction, or the concentration of scent (roughly stated).

Perhaps the shortage of topsoil is why some researchers are looking for a way to do without it. And here is the problem with that argument:

CONSERVATION OF TOPSOIL IS A FALLACY.

Anyone can read a book by Joel Salatin of Polyface, Inc., or subscribe to the Stockman Grassfarmer or other writings by its editor Allan Nation, or read about Bill Mollison's permaculture, in order to discover the following provable truth:

TOPSOIL IS CREATED, NOT CONSERVED.

Grass Farmers around the world are doing it every day. Each decade, their pastures rise up, threatening to bury the fence posts surrounding their fields. If those fences lasted long enough, the cows would eventually be able to walk right over them and into the great plains, which is also not a bad idea, if society has reorganized for survival by then.

Topsoil creation a free byproduct of profitable grazing at Polyface, Inc.

Likewise, permaculture creates self-sustaining local systems, even in the sands of the Saharan desert, where terraced gulleys planted with tall trees pull materials from deep roots, and shed biomass every fall, continually creating new mulch and new topsoil, PRODUCING NEW WATER by either coaxing it out of the atmosphere, or by retaining it by slowing rain water's path to the ocean, supplying water to lower trees and vegetable beds. Such wealth creation systems, whether naturally occurring or designed by a professional, are the only thing needed to overcome the worldwide shortage of water. And, as a free byproduct, they can conveniently overcome any regional shortage of food as well!

So the soil is not anyone's enemy, and there is no shortage of it, except for man-made regional shortages, which are easy enough to overcome, through a tiny little bit of intelligent design. And that is permaculture in a nutshell, which also goes by a few other names, including knowledge-rich ranching, and knowledge-rich farming.

And most importantly, nature knows exactly what to do with soil, which no amount of research can replace, at least not until we reach the point where technology achieves the ability to produce actual soil, which was there for free from the start! So, there is no point in spending large amounts of money in order to run circles in a hamster cage that leads to nowhere.

Nature's existing genetics are insufficient (says who?)

“Our technological contributions are threefold: ... (2) We will research genetically modified organisms made specifically for a controlled agricultural setting.” — excerpt from Agropolis "Our Solution" page

The problem with this approach is that every action has a reaction, and that even benign and benevolent intentions trigger the law of unintended consequences. World history has catalogued hundreds of years worth of economic devastations, where in each case a complex cycling natural system was put into a state of imbalance by some well-intentioned meddlesome simpleton, and where short-term profits for a few were later offset by massive long-term costs to society. There is never enough free energy to go up against nature and win economically, so these "advances" almost always represent a deferred cost to society, which I call a bad inheritance for future generations.

The European Union understands this, or at least the non-economic part, which is why it maintains a ban on GMO foods. And interestingly enough, this ban is currently in jeopardy, in spite of having very broad public support. A very conservative German colleague of mine thinks his fellow Germans are getting restless enough about it to respond by taking violence to the streets. And likewise, the precious few Americans that are not asleep do not have much tolerance for it, and I do not imagine any amount of coercion being able to contain the massive internal pressures building in the social fabric, which can only be relieved by non-GMO options in the marketplace. And non-GMO options for the marketplace are only possible by either designating large contintental-sized geographic regions as non-GMO, because seeds spread in the wind, or through highly controlled agricultural environments, such as those that Agropolis proposes.

Conclusion

I see a strong case for increasing demand for closed agricultural systems. Justifications include protecting crops from the spread of unwanted GMO seeds, including cost avoidance of their licensing fees (presently being extorted from owners of contaminated fields in exchange for nothing of like value, if you can believe it), acid rains, inclement weather, and drought. All those considerations, which are a part of what I call the world's "present distress", can be mitigated to some degree through controlled environments.

And as for the nature of that controlled environment, passive and natural controls are more robust than artificial ones that require external energy inputs, external supplement inputs, delicate control systems, or expensive equipment that won't last, and its maintenance. If the sun can do a better job than a light bulb, then it should, where purpose-driven architecture allows it. Likewise, if a palm tree could do the job of an aquaponic circulation system and its supplements, then it should, because that would waste less capital, produce a more robust and resilient system, and diversify the growing area, which would further mitigate against pest problems, and other multitudes of monoculture problems that result from taking a small system out of balance with nature, setting forces in motion that continually conspire to restore the balance.

Like other kinds of costly modern wars, this war against nature is unnecessary, can never be won at any price, and is counter-productive towards aims of feeding and watering the planet.