Emulating the circle of life
We need to rethink efficiency in our food system.

http://theecologist.org/2019/mar/25/emulating-circle-life
Date Written:  2019-03-25
Publisher:  The Ecologist
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23552

Developing food systems that simulate the processes found in nature can make food production more sustainable.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

When we build or manufacture things that don't exist in Nature, the bad tendency has been to neglect the tucked-in loops, so there's simply a lot of energy and scarce matter flowing into each process, and a degraded form of these is pumped out in the form of garbage, pollution and greenhouse gases.

But we can address this problem by introducing a circular-systems approach. A good example is industrial ecology (or industrial symbiosis), where many productive processes are networked, the waste of one becoming "the meat of another"....

In a realistic context, however, we are of course entirely dependent on the wider ecosystem within which our farm is inserted, so the 'closedness' is merely illusory. And the danger of a survivalist version of closed loop is that we become introspective and cut ourselves off from our place in society.

The point is that a farming model of the future must be able to feed the wider population in a sustainable way – which requires a large surplus over and above the consumption of the cultivators themselves