Deep-rooted problems: intensive agriculture degrades the soil on which future food production depends
PAUL WESTON / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
When Stéphane Quere took over his parents’ farm in Brittany 16 years ago, he didn’t have any particular desire to turn it organic. He had grown up seeing his parents labour to grow broccoli and shallots and caulifl ower on their 30 hectares, helping out from the age of seven, working through the summer holidays as a teenager. His main thought was: I have to fi nd a diff erent way to farm, one that isn’t so hard.
Stéphane’s dilemma is perhaps the fundamental question of all life since the dawn of time: how can we get enough food to sustain ourselves? In the Anthropocene era, it is a newly urgent question. Climate change is upon us and our dominion on Earth has become the planet’s most determining environmental factor. Agriculture and the food industry account for a quarter of global greenhouse emissions. How do we produce food and eat in a way that is not only sustaining for our own body and soul, but also the planet?