30/01/2023
We tend to believe stories that we have been told since childhood, that Australian soils are desperately nutrient deficient, that Australian farmers need to feed the world and to do that they have to use lost of synthetic inputs (by which we largely mean derived from petrochemicals). But the perceived limitations of agroecological approaches to farming were predicated on inappropriately selected crops, and not enough of them to design a long enough rotation (and least that meant we relied on a pasture, with some soil-building ability).
But if we look for a wider range of crops and include more legumes and non-wheat grains or cereals, and diversify production systems, a new measure of productivity is possible. We might investigate cover crops, intercropping, double cropping, alley farming, analog forestry, and other techniques that have informed organic and permaculture for decades.
Growing crops in a mixed tapestry saves land and produces more protein than crops grown in a conventional monoculture, finds a new meta-analysis that draws on an impressive gamut of 132 studies.This farming approach, known as ‘intercropping’, involves producing more than one type of food in a fi...
