Cornucopia’s Take: While Big Ag insists that GMOs are the only way to feed the world, this nonprofit is teaching interns to grow more food on less land. Biointensive farming methods build the soil quickly and use far less water to grow more food than conventional or GMO methods.
How Three U.S. Mini-Farms are Sowing the Seeds of Global Food Security
Ensia
by Bob Cooper
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Tiny, biointensive operations show smallholder farmers from around the world how they can grow far more food than conventional approaches.
Her face shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat, Olawumi Benedict is cheerfully tending to her “little babies” — kale seedlings growing in shallow wooden flats until they’re hardy enough for transplantation into soil beds. Three miles over the hills on another small farm, Jonnes Mlegwah is double-digging the soil with a spading fork, preparing to plant potatoes. Both are Africans, but these mini-farms are 140 miles north of San Francisco in Mendocino County, better known for the harvesting of redwood trees and marijuana plants than kale and potatoes.
Benedict and Mlegwah are a long way from home, and the biointensive farming system they’re mastering is a long way from becoming the norm — in the U.S. or Africa. Still, millions of small-scale farmers, especially in Latin America and Africa, are turning to it because it’s low-cost and low-tech, and it produces far greater yields than conventional agriculture while using far less land and water.
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