Towards a More Resilient Food System
From industrial thinking to a resilience mindset. Plus bread.
At the bottom of each post this week is a recipe! Today is the easiest, most delicious basic bread! If you are intimidated by bread, this is the recipe for you.
Today’s and tomorrow’s posts are informed by Dr. Laura Lengnick’s brilliant book: Resilient Agriculture.
If you read nothing else on how we produce food and how we might do better at that as our climate changes, please make it Laura’s book. It’s easy to read, inspiring, and also practical.
I have known Laura for almost 15 years now and she is one of my heroes for showing us an Earth’s Next Chapter I want to be part of. It’s also possible that the person with the ‘snappy British accent’ in chapter one is someone you know. :-)
So, today we’re going to introduce the idea of a resilient approach to agriculture rather than an industrial approach. It’s more of a conceptual level intro today, and we’ll get into the dirt (I’m loving the puns this week, even if you’re not), tomorrow and beyond.
What is resilience, when it comes to food and farming? And why do we want it?
Well, first of all, using the framing of resilience acknowledges that we’re in a new era of disruption and change.
Not only have the ‘normal’ climate conditions changed - really for the first time in human history - but there is no ‘new normal’. There is a constantly changing climate, punctuated by increasingly intense and frequent extreme weather events. This is difficult to manage in just about every sector, from construction to energy production, but it’s especially critical to understand when it comes to such a weather-dependent and ‘primary’ activity like growing food.
The way we think of climate resilience (in all sectors, not just agriculture) can be described by the phrase ‘build back better’, or ‘bouncing forward’. If we only thought of it as ‘bouncing back’, which is how a lot of us use the word resilience in common language, we would always be behind the eight ball, because conditions and the evolving demand of eight billion people, has already changed. Essentially, there is no normal to bounce back to.
But the really important aspect of ‘resilience-thinking’ in agriculture is that it gives us a framework and a clear pathway for transformation from the old and industrial approach of the 20th Century to a more sustainable, vibrant, socially-just, carbon-positive, and nutritious future.
The industrial mindset was predicated on the idea of optimizing our production under stable conditions. Its mantra is efficiency.
But no longer do we have stable conditions, and ruthless optimization is brittle: it will usually fail under variable conditions because there is no flexibility built in. In addition, a single-minded goal of efficiency doesn’t usually take into account the collateral costs - costs (like soil quality) that are now undermining our ability to produce decent food.
As Laura says in her book:
“Redesign for resilience….requires us to rethink some fundamental assumptions about how the world works - long held assumptions that are the foundations of modern science and technology….It means that we must let go of the toxic beliefs that fueled the industrial era: infinite growth, industrial efficiency, white supremacy, the invisible hand of the market and individualism. It means that we have to redefine the meaning of success.”
All of that sounds like an impossible task, except that Laura lays out all of the aspects of how we would do that and applies real-world tests, highlighting farms and farmers already engaged in it. It’s not impossible, not by a long-shot.
Laura outlines six general principles that need to change if we are to move from industrial to resilient thinking. She has much more behind each of these, but I think it’s worth just seeing them as a list. We need to move:
From optimum to variable conditions
From efficient to redundant systems
From expert to place-based knowledge
From industrial to ecological design
From imported to regional resources
From extractive to regenerative economy (this includes ‘community wellbeing’ in a holistic sense)
(By the way, I think it’s useful at this point, while we’re in the middle of the ‘big concepts’, to remember that we all exist inside the food system. We all occupy a place in its web. Most of us are heavily on the consumer end of the spectrum and the choices we make matter deeply. We play a bigger role than we likely believe in shifting our system. We’ll talk more about this later in the week.)
One the main components of resilience is the notion of ‘adaptive capacity’. So, let me (briefly! Promise!) say a few words about that.
In basic terms, your (or my, or a farm’s) adaptive capacity is our ability to manage a wide variety of either chronic or acute disruptions - not just our ability to manage the impact of one specific event at a time. It is about establishing the conditions that can absorb change and can help us gradually improve (‘build back better’). For example, if you have a good education, your adaptive capacity is generally greater in life than those who don’t - your options are broader as circumstances change.
There are lots of ways to increase adaptive capacity - financial security, community and social connections, increasing knowledge, and in many circumstances ‘diversity’ plays a huge role. Whether you’re looking at your retirement portfolio or a city or a farm, diversity, among other factors, allows you to reduce your vulnerability.
In terms of growing our food, the difference between how industrial approaches and resilient approaches deal with adaptive capacity is stark, and we’ll leave it here today with a comparison of the two, because it will lead in nicely to tomorrow’s post where we look at what this means in practice.
As Laura notes:
Industrial agriculture typically involves large holdings and is focused around producing commodity products. The inputs to the system are purchased (e.g. fertilizer), and the operation is supported by government subsidies (from disaster payments to agricultural labor exemptions). This system is dominated by choosing financial and technological assets to manage disruption.
Resilient agriculture typically involves smaller holdings and is focused around producing high value food. The inputs to the system are healthy soils and agrobiodiversity along with social capital, and the operation is supported by being well-adapted to local conditions. This system is dominated by choosing natural, human, and social assets to manage disruption.
I don’t know about you, but one of these just sounds a lot nicer than the other. It turns out it’s also more effective, cleaner, tastier, more empowering, oh and more sustainable too.
More details on what this looks like for farmers and for us, tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the easiest and tastiest recipe for homemade bread (from Josey Baker Bread): I have this dough, getting its flavor on, in the fridge right now.
NOTE: The average store-bought bread has 20-25 ingredients. You need four, one of which is water.
Four ingredients (to make a 2 lb loaf):
3 1/2 cups of bread flour
2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast
2 teaspoons of fine sea salt
1 3/4 - to - 2 cups of warm water (about 85 F - but I never use a thermometer)
Get a decently big bowl, dump all the dry ingredients in there and mix it up, then add the water - reserve a bit in case you need more, but 1 3/4 might be enough. It should be a pretty wet dough. Much goopier than you’re probably used to.
Put some cling wrap over that bowl and leave it be. About 3 hours. The dough should be about twice the size.
Put it in the fridge. Leave it there at least a day, but up to a few days. This is when the flavor develops.
Plop it out onto a floured counter, press it out into a circle(ish) and shape it into a loaf by folding two sides into the middle, then the other two sides, then roll or tuck it into a fat log - so that it will fit into your greased loaf pan.
Cover it with greased tin foil (in a tent shape to allow the loaf to rise), and leave it alone somewhere warmish (top of fridge?) for about 4 hours.
Bake it: 475F for 20 mins with foil on, then 20 mins with foil off. (Important to let the oven fully preheat).
Dump it out onto a cooling rack (using all the mitts and towels you need - it’s wicked hot) and LET IT COOL. It’s still cooking. For at least an hour. This is the hardest part. It smells like a hug.
Eat it all in one sitting. Share if you must.