What is agroecology?

People ask me what agroecology is, and I have learned to pause before answering, because the honest answer is bigger than the question expects. It is a way of farming. It is also a science, a social movement, and a way of describing how a whole food system works — from the fungi under a carrot to the politics of who owns the land it grew in and who can afford to buy it. That breadth is not a weakness of the word. It is the point of it.

But before the definitions, the thing underneath them. Everything I believe about farming comes down to one idea, and I want it said plainly at the start: the health of the soil, the water and the land is the same as your own health. Not a metaphor for it. The same thing. The land is an extension of your body — the food it grows becomes you, the water it holds is the water you drink, the air over it is the air you breathe — and a person who has understood that in their hands as well as their head does not need to be persuaded to look after it. Agroecology is, in the end, the practice of living as though that were true.

Now the family the word belongs to. Over the last century a number of approaches have grown up in answer to industrial farming: organic, biodynamic, permaculture, agroforestry, natural farming, and most recently “regenerative”. They differ in history and emphasis, but they share one instinct — that a farm is a living system to be worked with, not a factory to be run. You can think of it as two ways of seeing sitting side by side in farming today: an industrial one, which treats the land as a substrate and buys in what it needs, and an ecological one, which draws on millennia of indigenous and peasant practice as well as modern science, and tries to design a farm that feeds and protects itself. Every approach I just listed belongs to the second. In practice they are a toolkit, and most good farms I know use several at once: the design discipline of permaculture, the soil care of organics, the tree systems of agroforestry.

So where does agroecology sit in that family? Two things set it apart. The first is scope. The word was first used in 1928 for the study of ecology applied to crops — how the living community of a field behaves. By the 1980s, through the work of Miguel Altieri and Stephen Gliessman in the Americas and Pierre Rabhi in France and West Africa, it had become a practice as well as a science. In the 1990s it grew beyond the field edge to take in the whole food system: growing, processing, moving, selling, cooking, eating, and the rules and power that govern all of it. The definition most people use now is simply “the ecology of the food system”. Gliessman puts it as “a way of redesigning food systems, from the farm to the table”. That is why an agroecologist will talk about a supermarket contract in the same breath as a cover crop. The two are connected, and pretending otherwise is how we got here.

The second thing that sets it apart is that agroecology says out loud what many of its cousins leave unsaid: this is political. Not party-political, but political in the plain sense that it concerns who decides. In 2007, in a village called Nyéléni in Mali, several hundred delegates from peasant, fisher, pastoralist, indigenous and consumer movements across the world met and wrote down what they meant by “food sovereignty”. The heart of it is this: “Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. It puts those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.” Food sovereignty can sound abstract, so let me put it plainly: it means that the people who grow, sell and eat food in a place get to decide how that place’s food system works — what is grown, how, by whom, and where the value goes — rather than having it decided for them by distant boardrooms.

Eight years later the same movement met again at Nyéléni and turned to agroecology itself. Their 2015 declaration is the clearest statement I know of what the word means to the people who have practised it longest. “Agroecology is a way of life and the language of Nature, that we learn as her children. It is not a mere set of technologies or production practices.” And then, without apology: “Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society.” The declaration sets out what it calls the common pillars: ecological principles like feeding the soil and recycling nutrients; land and territory as something peoples have rights over; collective rights and access to the commons; the diversity of knowledge, including knowledge that never went near a university; the family and the community as the basis of self-organisation; autonomy from the global market rather than dependence on it; the leadership of women and the energy of young people. They also named what agroecology is not, and warned against its language being borrowed to dress up business as usual — “climate-smart agriculture”, “sustainable intensification”, the industrial monoculture of organic food. That warning matters more each year, as “regenerative” becomes a word that supermarket chains and agrochemical companies are happy to use. There is nothing wrong with the word; the writer Daniel Wahl makes the case that regeneration is a better aim than sustainability, since “the word sustainability itself is inadequate, as it does not tell us what we are actually trying to sustain”, and I agree with him. But regeneration describes what happens to the land. Agroecology adds who decides and who benefits. That is why one word can be borrowed and the other cannot: you cannot claim agroecology while leaving the power where it was.

None of this means a farmer has to arrive fully formed. Most of the good work in this movement is transition, and Gliessman gives a useful way of seeing it as five levels. The first is using the industrial inputs — fertiliser, sprays, diesel — more efficiently. The second is swapping them for gentler alternatives: compost for bagged nitrogen, biological controls for pesticide; in his own words, organic and biodynamic farming are examples of this level, and “many of the same problems that occur in industrial systems also occur” there. The third is the real turn: redesigning the farm so that it does not need the inputs at all, because the rotations, the hedges, the trees, the animals and the soil life are doing the work between them. The fourth level leaves the farm gate: reconnecting the people who grow food with the people who eat it, through box schemes, markets and community-supported farms, so that value and knowledge flow both ways — Gliessman calls this “food citizenship”, and I think it is the best two-word description of what a veg box member actually is. The fifth is the horizon: a food system rebuilt on fairness, participation and justice. Notice that the first two levels are where most “sustainable” farming stops, and where most of the borrowed language lives. Agroecology is the name for going on to three, four and five.

How does a food system actually change, though? The people who study this used to borrow a model built for technology — new ideas grow in sheltered niches until they break into the mainstream, the way electric cars are replacing petrol ones. Colin Anderson and his colleagues at Coventry point out that the model “was originally developed to understand how technological innovation can lead to the consolidation of new commercial products”, and that farming is not like that. The food system is held in place by money and power — supermarkets, input companies, subsidy rules — and it will not make room for an alternative just because the alternative works better. So they look instead at six arenas where change either happens or is blocked. Land: can people get and keep land, water and seed? Knowledge: do farmers learn from each other and their own fields, or only from experts and sales reps? Markets: do people sell through relationships they help shape, or through a chain that dictates the price? Networks: are farms connected to each other and to allies, or isolated? Fairness: who is being left out? And the story: does “feed the world with technology” drown out “communities have the right to shape their own food”? Their conclusion is that the deciding factor across all six is governance — who holds the power and how democratic it is — and that governments “cannot create, insert, control, or manage niches in a top-down fashion”. They can only clear space. The rest has to be built from the ground.

Which raises the question of scale, and here there is a distinction I have found more useful than almost any other. Scaling out is what most people mean by growth: more farms, more places, more people fed. Scaling up is changing the rules — policy, law, subsidy, planning — so the ecological way becomes the easier way. And scaling deep is the slow work of changing what people believe and how they relate: what land is for, what food is, what a good life looks like, and what we owe to the ground under our feet. The three depend on each other. The researchers who named them found that “replication could go on forever and would never address the root of the systemic problem”. Replication without cultural roots is a fashion; culture without replication is a feeling; policy without either is a paper commitment the next government tears up.

And the evidence from the places where agroecology has actually spread — I studied one, around Totnes and Dartington in Devon, and the same pattern shows in Cuba, Central America, southern Brazil and Karnataka — is that the deep work comes first, and that it travels through people who are organised. The team, led from Mexico, that studied the biggest cases put it in one sentence: “Social organization is the culture medium upon which agroecology grows.” Not the technique, not the grant. A farmer trying something alone is a curiosity; a farmer inside a network that meets, visits and argues is the start of a chain reaction. And the learning that spreads it is horizontal — “farmers are more likely to believe and emulate a fellow farmer … than they are to take the word of an agronomist” — and it carries more than information. In their phrase, “farmers first and foremost make culture.” A study of grassroots training across Europe, including the Land Workers’ Alliance here, found the same four things wherever the learning was working: it was sideways, not top-down; it put practical skill and the bigger politics in the same room; it treated everyone’s knowledge as worth hearing; and it built networks as it went. Rupert Dunn of Torth y Tir in Wales said something in that study I keep coming back to: “People often don’t want to join the club because they feel that they’ve got to change something about themselves in order to do it. What I like about agroecology is that we don’t have to do that.”

That is why participation is not an add-on to agroecology. It is the substance of it. The old phrase for a whole education was head, heart and hands, and a food system that is going to hold up needs all three from the community it feeds. Head is ecological literacy, which sounds like a qualification and is actually a handful of facts about how life works: nothing is waste, because one thing’s waste is another’s food; everything cycles; the sun drives it all; diversity is what makes a system tough; and, as the biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan put it, “life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.” Heart is care for a particular field, a particular hedge, a particular stretch of river, because you have stood in it — and this is where the body comes back in. Care follows contact. You do not learn that the soil’s health is your health from a page; you learn it from a season of eating what you helped grow. Hands are the season itself: planting, weeding, harvesting, packing, cooking, until the knowledge is in your body and not just your head. The Center for Ecoliteracy has a line about schools that applies to any organisation, and certainly to a farm: it teaches “whether they are conscious of it or not — by how they make community decisions, invest their resources, and provision themselves with food, energy, materials, shelter, transport, and water.” A farm teaches by how it behaves. If the decisions are made elsewhere, it teaches that too.

There is one more piece, and it explains why a community farm feels different from a farm shop, and why it cannot be run on price alone. Lewis Hyde, in his book on gifts, draws what he calls the cardinal difference: “a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.” A gift has to keep moving — you pass it on — and, because the things that grow are alive, “the gift grows because living things grow.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, borrows Hyde for the difference between wild strawberries and the ones in a plastic punnet: “a gift creates ongoing relationship.” A box share, a volunteer morning, the glut given to a neighbour, seed saved and handed on — these are gift transactions inside a market economy, and they do something a purchase cannot. They create bond, and motion, and increase. Kimmerer’s shortest summary of how a living system works is three words long, and it is the truest sentence in this whole piece: “All flourishing is mutual.”

This is what we are trying to build at Norton Community Farm. It is a field at Norton Court Farm beside the A38 at Prior’s Norton, and it will not feed Gloucester. It will feed the households on the veg box scheme, and give ten families allotments, and be a place where volunteers, school groups and course participants can put their hands in the soil and learn to read it. The farm is run as a community interest company — not for profit, open to all, its assets locked to the community — because the Nyéléni definition is right about where the decisions should sit, and because the alternative is a project that looks like agroecology and is owned like a business. Every one of those things is a niche, in the language above, and a piece of the organisational fabric, and a classroom. Every one of them is scaling deep before it is anything else.

If you take one thing from this, let it be the thing I started with. Agroecology is not a technique you buy or a label you earn. It is a relationship between a community, its land and its food, held together by the knowledge that their health is one health. We live and learn here together; by joining in with the ecological evolution of the land, we grow and thrive alongside it — mutually flourishing, each more alive because of the other. Which is why the invitation is not to come and see the farm. It is to come and be part of it: to eat from this soil, to put your hands in it, and to find out for yourself that its health and yours were never two things.

JEHAN- BASIL GIBSON - THE AGROECOLOGY PROJECT