Pillar of sand: can the irrigation miracle last?

Abstract

In the beginning, all agriculture was organic.Then came the pressure sprayer, the sack of fertiliser and the Green Revolution.And agriculture became 'intensive', to meet the challenge of feeding mankind.In the end, the ecological pyramid got skewed and pushed off-balance.Any farmer in the world who knows her or his land can tell you that, as Joël de Rosnay 1 put it, "an ecosystem which is off-balance will spontaneously seek to become more complex, increasing its load of insects and weeds, which farmers in turn will seek to control by increasing their use of pesticides and weedkillers".Not all farmers do it though.Four out of five farmers in the world, mainly in the South, are subsistence farmers and only have the means to plant their crops and hope that their harvest will feed their family.And one farmer in a hundred, mainly in the North, has deliberately Put simply…• The market for organic produce is a promising one, but it is limited.• Organic farming methods carry no miracles, but they do, by and large, help sustainability.• 'Sound' agriculture is a way of applying these methods pragmatically, and profitably, for the benefit of the largest possibe number of farmers.