Terraquaculture

Farming Living Water Flowing Through the Landscape

Why Terraquaculture?

A recent opinion piece on Aljazeera.com by Stan Cox, a scientist with the Land Institute in Kansas, USA, reveals why we need terraquaculture type approaches, based on agroforestry and traditional soil building food production techniques.

"The bottomline: 25 per cent of the world's food-producing soils are highly degraded or are rapidly being degraded. Add to that other soils which they say are degrading "moderately", and the area under threat amounts to one-third of the Earth's endowment of cropland."

The solution?

"Intercropping, tree-planting, managing water and restoring nutrients to the land are all efforts to recover ecological benefits that were lost when natural landscapes (mostly mixtures of perennial species) were converted into croplands growing chiefly annual monocultures. But it's not just this component or that characteristic of a natural ecosystem that makes it erosion-proof, watertight and frugal with nutrients. Natural ecosystems came to be that way over evolutionary time thanks to vast networks of interdependent microbes, plants, animals and mineral substances.

"Simply adjusting the way soils are farmed can slow soil loss, but it cannot achieve that kind of ecological strength - just as installation of new, efficient air-conditioning in a thousand-square-metre mansion may save some energy, but can't make the house "green". If we are to have a global soil base that can sustain human civilisation over the long term, we will have to create entirely new ways of farming that emulate natural ecosystems to achieve their degree of resilience."

Read the full article "The World Can't Afford to Keep Wasting Soil" by Stan Cox here.

Terraquaculture

Terraquaculture is the practice of farming living water flowing through the landscape. It is the traditional farming system of the Asia-Pacific region where it has been practiced for thousands of years and is arguably the only truly sustainable farming system.

Communal paddy harvest, Philippines (Photograph by Dion Workman)

Terraquaculture is natural farming without imported energy, agro-chemicals or irrigation infrastructure. Despite the absence of these modern agricultural "improvements" terraqueous systems are often highly productive.

Introduction to terraquaculture

Terraquaculture Intermediate Training

Twizel, Aotearoa/New Zealand

March 18 - 24, 2012

Limited to 4-5 trainees.

1-2 places remain, and TQ graduates are invited to apply for these, by demonstrating how they have continued to develop and apply the skills they learnt in the introductory TQ course.

For more information contact terraquaculture.net