Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

While no blanket technology fits this bill, there’s now an emerging set of agricultural practices that blends the best of agronomy, forestry, ecology, hydrology, and a number of other sciences. Known as agroecology, the basic idea is to design food systems that mimic the natural world. Instead of striving for zero-environmental impacts, agroecologists want systems that produce more food on less land while simultaneously enhancing ecosystems and promoting biodiversity. And they’re getting them. A recent UN survey found that agroecology projects in fifty-seven countries have increased crop yields an average of 80 percent, with some being pushed up to 116 percent. One of the most successful of those is the push-pull system, developed to help Kenyan maize farmers deal with pestilence, invasive parasitic weeds, and poor soil conditions. Without getting too technical, push-pull is an intercropping system in which farmers plant specific plants between rows of corn. Some plants release odors that insects find unpleasant. (They “push” insects away.) others, like sticky molasses grass, “pull” the insects in, acting as a kind of natural flypaper. Using this simple process, farmers have increased crop yields by 100 to 400 percent. More importantly, while these agroecological techniques are widely available today (three hundred thousand African farmers have already adopted push-pull), we are only beginning to understand their real potential. Although the practices themselves look decid...