Farming that does not degrade its own base.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Save and Grow: A Policymaker's Guide to the Sustainable Intensification of Smallholder Crop Production
FAO · 2011
Argues smallholder farmers can raise yields without the environmental damage of industrial input use by combining conservation agriculture,…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Farmers of Forty Centuries
F. H. King · 1911
Documents how Chinese, Korean and Japanese farmers sustained soil fertility for forty centuries through intercropping, multi-storey planting and…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
An Introduction to Agroforestry
P. K. R. Nair · 1993
Systematises agroforestry as a discipline in its own right, arguing that combining trees with crops or livestock on the same land is often more…
+1 more at this level
10 works
FAO
Argues smallholder farmers can raise yields without the environmental damage of industrial input use by combining conservation agriculture, integrated pest management and targeted inputs.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FAO
Argues that agriculture, as the largest user of fresh water, has to become the primary site of water-saving policy rather than an afterthought to municipal conservation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Allan Savory
Argues that carefully managed, high-density grazing that mimics wild herds can restore degraded grassland faster than removing livestock altogether — a claim later disputed by rangeland scientists whose controlled trials found no consistent advantage over conventional grazing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026F. H. King
Documents how Chinese, Korean and Japanese farmers sustained soil fertility for forty centuries through intercropping, multi-storey planting and closing the nutrient loop, and argues Western agriculture had abandoned techniques it still needed.
about 6 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Albert Howard
Argues that industrial agriculture's reliance on chemical fertiliser breaks the natural cycle of humus returning to soil, and that composting organic waste back onto fields is what keeps soil fertile indefinitely.
about 6 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Bill Mollison & David Holmgren
Proposes designing agricultural systems on the pattern of natural ecosystems — perennial, multi-layered, self-maintaining — rather than as the annual monocultures of conventional farming.
Andy Clark
Argues cover crops pay for themselves through soil and pest benefits alone, before counting any yield effect, and works through which species suit which rotation and climate.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Derpsch et al.
Documents the worldwide spread of no-till farming and argues its benefits — reduced erosion, lower fuel and labour costs, higher water infiltration — hold across very different climates and farm sizes.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026P. K. R. Nair
Systematises agroforestry as a discipline in its own right, arguing that combining trees with crops or livestock on the same land is often more productive and more stable than separating them.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Rattan Lal
Argues that restoring carbon to degraded agricultural soils could offset a meaningful share of annual fossil-fuel emissions while also raising the soils' own fertility.