T-POP News No. 67
In this issue of T-POP News we present an overview of synecoculture, a
breakthrough agricultural approach that might one day be the salvation of mankind. The
article was contributed by Masatoshi Funabashi of the Fundamental Research Laboratory,
our leading researcher on synecoculture. While still in the research phase, synecoculture is
a novel approach that is very different from current organic farming. Actual cultivation
trials are now in progress at experimental farms to assess the value of this new approach to
farming. Here we offer a broad introduction to this new area of research that leverages
Sony technology.
Research Introduction: Synecoculture
Research Objectives
What area of research is most critically important for ensuring that our children's
generation survives and flourishes in the years ahead? Reflecting on the work I was doing at
the time, I asked myself this question when my child was born. Thinking ahead to future
generations, the frame of reference is very different from the usual mundane things that are on
my mind: areas of specialty and things I am curious about, contributions to upcoming
academic conferences and short-term business interests. The difficulty of predicting the future
from the present is the challenge of choosing the sort of social system one would like to see
and when it would be achieved. To do that, one must thoroughly consider civilization as a
whole in the context of earth's finite environment starting from the foundation of natural
science (that of course includes industrial applications), then transitioning to a future
sustainable economic model and social ideology.
CSL's Open Systems Science offers a way to deal positively with systems that change
dynamically (including ourselves), and adopts research guidelines that emphasize
management as technology that always survives in the face of unexpected disturbances and
uncertain data. Among the many difficult challenges facing humanity today, the cluster of
issues involving food, the environment, and healthcare will largely determine whether the next
generation survives or not. Agriculture, as the underlying foundation of advancing civilization,
is at the very core of these issues.
Humans have engaged in agriculture for over 10,000 years since the dawn of history,
but that history has observed a certain quality of law. First, is the trade-off between
agricultural production and environmental degradation. Many an ancient civilization—
beginning with ancient Sumer and Greece, and countless others down through the ages— have
fallen precisely because they destroyed the environment by over-farming their lands. Even
with today's advances in science and technology, modern agriculture is beset of problems of
increasing severity such as topsoil erosion and environmental degradation from agricultural
chemicals and fertilizers. Fish taken from the rivers flowing through pastoral French
countryside contain such high levels of PCBs that the regional law
had to ban the consumption of fish (2007), and gases caused by fertilizer runoff into
the ocean have been killing livestock, even a horse. The devastation of marine ecosystems has
been catastrophic. And today some 70% of arable dry regions across the planet are vulnerable
to desertification, and the growth of deserts in 87% of those areas is attributed to human
factors (UNEP, 1991).
Second, agricultural activities of civilization have consistently broken down the natural
ecosystem in complex ways, such that just a small number of modes have been adopted and
further developed by optimizing their production. In natural ecosystems, there are plenty of
species that do not have any particular value as food (which is the primary definition of a
useful species for agriculture production), and these various species interact in a competitive
symbiotic state to form a complex network. Modern ecology and biology are only now
beginning to understand this complexity, much less control it. With agriculture thus cut off
from its past history of vegetation, farmers churn up the earth, fertilizer is used to boost yields,
and methods are developed to eliminate swarming insects and weeds so the damaged
ecosystem can recover. Intuitively we can see that totally eliminating all factors beyond
human control would push agriculture toward monoculture on desert-like land with
impoverished vegetation and soil structure across all climate zones. The final culmination
would be a vegetable factory system, an artificial environment in which every aspect of plant
growth is closely controlled. The pesticide-free organic farming that has attracted so much
attention in recent years is not far removed from this desert monoculture. These systems exact
a qualitative impact on the environment while producing food, so again this underscores the
fundamental tradeoff between production and sustainability. On the other hand, non-tilled
natural farming that eschews fertilizer alone has minimal adverse impact on the environment,
but is unable to increase yields.
What is Synecoculture?
What can we do to break out of these vicious cycles that cripple agriculture?
Agricultural practices up to now have been based largely on cultivating plants in extremely
impoverished almost desert-like soils, and there have been practically no attempts to just
leave the luxuriant foliage and forests as they are and harness the self-organizing capacity
of woodlands at the ecological level for productive purposes. Once soil is inevitably
exhausted from continuous farming, the only recourse up now has been simply to allow the
land lie fallow to recover. By converting to the ecosystem as a useful state for agricultural
production, we can focus attention on very large scale systems that far exceed just a few
discrete crops; instead of the conventional approach of just focusing on optimizing a few
crops, a framework in which useful factors for production could be extracted by bolstering
and reinforcing the material cycle of the ecosystem in natura—i.e., in the setting of a
natural ecosystem governed by natural selection. Indeed, this defines relationalistic
optimization in contrast to elementalistic optimization that characterizes agriculture from
millennia past up to the present.
More specifically, this involves selecting useful plant species for agricultural
production from the in natura ecosystem for dense polyculture planting that achieves
greater biodiversity than one finds in nature. The conventional wisdom has always been to
give plants room to grow, apply nutrients, and tend plants so they will flourish and won't
compete with each other at the individual plant level. The optimum physiological niche for
growing plants at the individual level is to grow them in a vast number of individual
flowerpots or containers. Yet one finds that plants in the wild grow in dense, polyculture
forests.
Because plants interrelate in a complex competitive symbiosis, they are forced out
of their respective optimum physiological niches. Yet even as plants are forced out of
optimum physiological settings, an optimum ecological site is formed where plants thrive
in a dense, polyculture state. The argument favoring a relationalistic approach to farming
rests on this concept of the optimum ecological setting.
Obviously, the harvesting of plants grown in dense, polyculture groves must be
handled differently. Unlike the conventional practice where crops are uniformly tended,
uniformly raised, and uniformly harvested at harvest time; in the polyculture regime, plants
tend to mature slower and with variable speed due to competition, so harvesting is done as
an ongoing process to remove or thin out the larger specimens. Indeed, we have now
verified that this mixed polyculture approach produces bigger yields than modern
agribusiness methods even without fertilizer. We have also found that the costs to eradicate
and control weeds can be substantially reduced by covering the ground with variety of
different vegetables. Even with these remarkable yields, naturally occurring weeds augment
biodiversity and meliorate the soil to yield good crops without tilling and without taking the
land out of production to lie fallow.
Soil exhaustion does not occur in wild grasslands, and one can easily identify ten or
more varieties of weeds and grasses. Because different plant species are pollinated by
different insects, greater diversity of plants means more abundant animal flora, which
augments the fertility of the soil. To put it another way, diversity is required for
constructive soil formation of individual plants. So in this sense, even the notion of
companion plants that attract beneficial insects is limited to just a few species of plants at
most, well below the biodiversity one find in natura. Soil exhaustion—the primary factor
exacerbating the tradeoff between productivity and environmental degradation—is caused
by growing relatively few plants in a physiological optimum niche. It does not occur in
relationalistic agriculture: polycultures where the number of species are equivalent to in
natura or where even more species are grown in optimum ecological niches. In fact, we
have now confirmed that a dense polyculture of vegetables can be grown continuously on
non-tilled plots for four years straight without use of pesticides or fertilizer.
We have combined ecosystem interactions with dense polyculture plantings of
useful species for greater biodiversity than in natura, to implement a relationalistic
agriculture system called synecoculture that reconciles productivity greater than
elementalistic agriculture with the ecosystem and soil structure. Trials are currently under
way at several experimental farms mainly in japan to assess the general applicability of
synecoculture practices to farming in different climate zone around the world.
Relation Between Synecoculture and Health
Aside from its impact on yields and the environment, there is another issue of great
importance for synecoculture: that is, the effects on human health of consuming in natura
plants and vegetables. Most vegetables available at supermarkets today are farm-grown in
optimum physiological niches. Yet people have been consuming plants grown in optimum
ecological niches for millennia stretching back to the dawn of human agriculture. So far
there has been very little study of the effects on the human metabolism of eating plants
grown in natura because of their diversity and complex composition. The overall state of
plant metabolite is problematic, so it's difficult to reduce specific nutrients. The incidence
of nutritional deficiency diseases has been greatly reduced thanks to advances in molecular
nutrition. Yet there is little hope of finding an effective approach for dealing with chronic
conditions that constitute a real failure of the system at the nutrient level. The fact that
taking the best supplements modern nutrition has to offer cannot keep us healthy speaks to
the importance of biologically active substances grown in natura that cannot be reduced to
a mere list to nutrients. The series of themes evoked by synecoculture—environment, food,
and health—are inextricably linked, and must be dealt with from a long-term view.
Synecoculture Challenges
Yet synecoculture faces a host of issues that must be overcome. This can be
attributed to vast amount of complex, overlapping information regarding complicated
interactions of the ecosystem. Current tending and harvesting of vegetation must be carried
out based on multifaceted conditions: climate, soil quality, state of past crops grown on the
land, encroaching weeds, crops planned for one year hence, and host of other
considerations. It is not unlike the level of knowledge required by a skilled physician who
determines a course of action based on a diagnosis learned from experience with numerous
patients and the results of an exam and interview with the patient. Few supplies are used
since there is no elementalistic optimization involved, but a vast amount of information
processing is required to implement the relationalistic optimization approach. To enable us
to better understand the mechanisms of ecosystems and continue to use ecosystems while
building a smart ecosystem at little cost, we are now harnessing a range of technologies
developed by Sony and CSL to build a synecoculture management support system that
should be completed in the near-term future. In developing sustainable economic systems,
costs can be held down by using information to implement control rather than hardware,
and in that sense, synecoculture might be interpreted as bringing the information age to
agriculture.
Future of Synecoculture
My readers will be aware of Sony's Road to Zero initiative committing the company
to reduce its environmental impact to zero by the year 2050. To my mind, in light of Sony's
technological prowess, this goal is far too modest. Sony's goal should be to go beyond zero
impact to forge a new form of industry through its existence that begins the process of
rolling back our impact and restoring the global environment. Synecoculture goes a long
way toward achieving this goal.
In contrast to symbiosis which defines a mutually beneficial relationship between
species that occur in natura, synecoculture is a state of relationalistic optimization achieved
by human management in combination with symbiotic relations. It is here that one can find
constructive significance of man in the ecosystem.
At one time, the products of what are now broken up into discrete primary
industries—farming, forestry, fishery, stockbreeding, and so on— were taken in reasonable
quantities from a continuous natural cycle. By promoting relationalistic science within in
natura ecosystems, this opens the way to human-mediated synecoculture industry
(synecoculture in the broad sense) reconciling productivity of primary industries with
restoration and build-up of the environment. In this sense, synecoculture is not only an
environmentally constructive type of primary industry, it is also a relationalistic life science
experimental system.
Once primary industries become relationally linked, low-cost advanced information
synecoculture industry becomes commonplace, and agriculture disappears as a separate
distinct framework, we will see the emergence of the symbiotic earth in which civilization
and nature are no longer in conflict. The hints provided by this promising research have
much to teach us about plant life in natura that will affect the future we choose and the
world that we bequeath to our children's generation.
Reference Figures
Figure 1: Elementalistic optimization and relationalistic optimization
Direction of modern farming in which useful species are taken from in natura ecosystem
including complex positive and negative interactions and growth is optimized for each
individual species (arrow pointing to the left), versus the direction to synecoculture that
combines ecosystem interactions and exceeds in natura (arrow pointing to the right). The
idea of conventional sustainable agriculture lies between the in natura ecosystem and
modern agriculture.
Figure 2: Overview of a synecoculture farm (Ise Synecolculture Farm)
Features include a growing area of mounded up ridges, paths for tending and harvesting,
and trellises for vines and climbing plants. Small fruit trees are planted on ridges to create a
suitable environment for vegetables: the right shade to protect vegetables, formation of
compost from leaf litter, controlling insects with birds, etc. The fruit is a byproduct, but we
are also experimenting with a synecolculture orchard with plantings of vegetables beneath
the fruit trees.
Figure 3: Mounded up ridges at the synecolculture farm (Ise Synecolculture Farm)
Mixed array of vegetables are densely planted on the ridges. Some 13 kinds of large
vegetables can be seen on the 3-by-6-foot plot. In grassy areas, nursery plants are ready
and waiting.