While I have long been an advocate of humans returning to hunting/gathering and abandoning agriculture as ecologically destructive and promoting gross overpopulation, the ideas expressed in this post are excellent.  Finally, a farmer who goes way beyond organic and recognizes the immense ecological harms that manipulation of the Earth causes!

And Stephanie is correct, the farmers can't do it alone.  People need to change their expectations and diets to accommodate the ecosystems in which they live.  As I said a short while ago in another thread, if you want to eat bananas, go live in South America.  We should all be willing to live off what grows in our own ecosystems without totally destroying them by growing things that require massive amounts of irrigation or severe changes of the land.

If this was really the "native" landscape, wouldn't it be filled with buffalo that the locals would be gorging on daily?

We work a croft in Scotland on a site that's had human occupation for at least 2,000 years. Our buildings have been here for 200 years, the local kirk has a headstone dating to the early 1100s, and the stone circle across the road from our croft dates to the Neolithic.

We're largely unmechanised--I've just spent a couple of days mowing with a scythe--but produce sufficient meat (pork, lamb and chicken), vegetables, soft fruit and tree fruit to be reasonably self-sufficient. We also shoot, trap and forage from the wild larder.

In fact, we do so well that we often have seasonal surpluses that we had thought we could swap, barter or sell within our local community. But we've found that most people hereabouts don't want local produce--they prefer the "clean", "hygienic", uniform and packaged produce from supermarkets.

We sell eggs and vegetables to people who live in the city an hour's drive away, but almost none to the people in our village. We sell pork and chicken to people who live three hours away, but only two people in the village will buy it. We can trade jams, pickles, chutneys, preserves, saved seeds and the like with people all around the country, but not to locals.

What makes it even more peculiar is that the locals readily concede we're not doing anything remotely "hippyish"--we're simply doing what they or their parents did until 20-30 years ago.

Farms hereabouts used to be mixed family concerns, with cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, barley, oats, potatoes, vegetables and fruit. The fields were worked in rotation, with few synthetic chemical inputs, using seeds of plants that grew well in our conditions.

Now, the pig sties are empty, the field housing is rotting in a corner, the vegetables are long gone and the fruit trees grubbed out. Now, sheep and cattle are intensively produced for the supermarkets, heavily fertilised and sprayed barley is grown for the brewers, and even more intensively sprayed oil seed rape is grown for vegetable oil/biodiesel. The farming families eat processed burgers and ready meals, while they lament how little they get for what they produce.

It's a funny old world.

I don't claim to be even close to an archaeologist, but according to what I've learned since living in archaeology central (aka the Southwest), Ancestral Puebloans did have trade with far off cultures -- items such as parrot feathers from southern Mexico and seashells from the Pacific Coast have been found in the remnants of their dwellings.

Tom encapsulated my point quite well with his comment. That is, I feel that regional production built on the ecological strengths of the area, coupled with vibrant (and fair, hopefully) trade, makes a lot of sense. A little hunting/gathering is a nice accompaniment to this, and I won't dispute the point that hunting/gathering cultures are probably more efficient per unit of effort for food gathered, but I think I'm sort of wedded to a primarily agrarian society -- it's produced a lot of things I'm rather attached to, despite its shortcomings.

Stephanie

This could also could be an endorsement of "just enough suburbia" ... enough for an intensive garden.

I had not thought much about this lately, but this post refreshed the idea.  

Google "bioregionalism" and you will find a wealth of good references on the subject.  

Just to make this clear, I do not advocate that all of the currently grossly overpopulated humans immediately abandon agriculture and switch to being hunter/gatherers.  Doing that would probably be more immediately destructive than the current agricultural system, which is saying quite a bit.

However, no one can seriously claim that with a human population that is low enough to be ecologically harmonious, agriculture is exponentially more harmful than hunting and gathering.  Returning to the hunter/gatherer lifestyle should therefore be our ultimate goal, but just as humans created this mess when they began agriculture 10-12,000 years ago, it will take a very long time to be able to get back to it.