Shamba Centre Co-founder and Director of Programmes, Oshani Perera is currently attending the Extinction or Regeneration conference in London. Below, she shares her enthusiasm and insights from the first day.
It was a full day with three plenary panels and eight speakers on each one, from farmer and producers to thought leaders and academics. Without exception, they were all highly articulate and were ‘walking the talk’ on sustainable food systems. They were armed with:
Facts that agroecology designs work. David Finely, told us about his organic, cow and calf dairy farm, The Ethical Dairy in Scotland. The yields are large enough that the business model now includes ice cream, cheese and a children’s playground.
Proof that the right regenerative and agro ecological designs can produce food, sequester carbon and deliver ecosystem services. Heginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, founder of the Tree Range® Farms shared how he could provide free range chicken farmed alongside other trees and crops to feed the world on less that 15% of the land used for intensive chicken farming today.
Certainty that food, farming, nutrition, health, the environment, and livelihoods are interdependent. The concept of one “One Health” should be expanded to ‘One Earth’ and ‘One Humanity’.
Conviction that ‘sustainable’ intensification is giving way to ‘eco-intensification’. The future of farming will be built on traditional knowledge combined with technology. science and a deeper understanding of natural systems.
Hope that we, proponents of sustainable agriculture and the sustainable development goals, will have the courage to lead.
The faster we can reduce our dependence on chemical inputs, the faster we can transition towards agro-ecological and ‘closed looped’ circular farming. We discussed why agro ecological designs take time, trial and error to get right. Nature is ever changing and therefore we, stakeholders of sustainable food systems, also need to continually evolve in our thinking and ingenuity. We established that intensive agriculture is only seemingly productive as we tend to to overlook the expensive seeds and harmful chemicals that are needed to intensify yields. We worried that small farmers and producers in developing countries were the most affected by their continued dependence on seeds and inputs that they could ill afford.
Today, I had the most thought provoking eight hours since we founded the Shamba Centre for Food and Climate in October 2022. Entrepreneurs who were transitioning toward more sustainable business models told me about their personal and financial sacrifices. Academics share with me their research on the perils of livestock intensification. Thought leaders invited me to join the UNDP programme on mindfulness and farming. I was not simply inspired by expertise around me, but the sincerity with which people listened, exchanged, and share their stories. It certainly shows that only the greatest minds can have the courage to be humble.
“We have completely forgotten what we knew 30 years ago about how to design diverse farming systems that work with nature. We got pushed into producing more and more, even though we knew it was destroying our lands, our health, and our communities. It took the better part of 10 years to transition into a diverse, biologically resistant and financially sustainable agroecological business. And now we have songbirds”.
- Professor Nettie Wiebe, farmer, activist, feminist and Professor Emerita, St Andrew’s College University Saskatchewan