”We cannot feed 10 billion people in a sustainable way using the current production systems. We can’t. We need to be much more thrifty with our land, and we need to boost our productivity.” [said Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph.]

That’s where science and experimentation… are increasingly playing a role.

“We’re working with nature’s biological ecological processes,” Entz said in an interview with Quirks & Quarks. “In nature, things are diverse. In nature, nutrients are recycled, carbon is recycled. And in nature, perennial plants are the dominant plant species as opposed to annual plants.”

Entz says agriculture — at least across much of the Western world — is in a period of transition away from a reliance on “command and control” systems that seek to dominate nature to maximize yields.

“We’ve gone from the mechanical to the chemical era, and now, we’re entering the biological era of agriculture where we’re, you know, looking at the limits of, especially, the chemicals,” he said. “And we’re thinking, how can we do this the way nature does it? How can we mimic nature to create a solution to a problem?”

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here.