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Restoration Agriculture reveals how to sustainably grow perennial food crops that can feed us in our resource-compromised future. The restoration agriculture system described in this award-winning book works! It is possible for humans to produce staple foods using perennial agricultural ecosystems that actually improve the quality of the environment. This can be done on a backyard, farm or ranch scale and is needed right now-on a global scale. Restoration Agriculture explains how we can have all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for our food, building, fuel, and many other needs. Using the restoration agriculture system, an oak savanna mimic will produce more than twice the number of edible human calories per acre as an average acre of corn, never needs to be planted again, prevents erosion, creates oil, and can be managed with no fossil fuel inputs. This book, based on real-world practices, presents an alternative to the agriculture system of eradication and offers exciting hope for our future.… (more)
User reviews
There are a few flaws in his rhetoric. First, Shepard recommends against direct marketing and local economies, opting instead for wholesaling and commodity markets. This ties into his second set of issues, surrounding the word profit. Shepard suggests that farming isn't profitable. He is correct about this, but he then goes on how to describe that people can't make a living by farming. But making a profit and making a living are different things. There are plenty of people working at non-profits that are still alive. And I know a number of farmers whose livelihoods come from farming. Shepard is just using the word "profit" incorrectly.
But I can get how he's gotten the idea that farming isn't economically viable; because he doesn't use direct markets! Local economies are key to the success of "sustainable" food production. To use a rational term, local economies are efficient; global economies aren't.You can't have restoration agriculture without "restoration economics," and this is one of the shortcomings of Shepard's book.