Fertile Ground

There are about 2.5 billion people in the world, on 500 million farms, involved with smallholder family agriculture and food production. Their creative capacity to farm productively and sustainably with nature, instead of against it, is perhaps the most powerful force that can be unleashed to overcome the interlinking challenges of hunger, poverty, climate change, and environmental degradation. This is the essence of agroecology.Numerous books and reports detail the negative consequences of our industrialized agricultural system. Many also document the nature, viability, and benefits of agroecology. Yet scaling agroecology and changing our agricultural and food systems remains a great challenge. How do we accomplish that? Fertile Ground seeks to answer that question by drawing on grounded practice and research.At the heart of this book are nine case studies from different contexts: Brazil, Honduras, Haiti, Ecuador, the United States, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and the Netherlands. They describe practical, ground up, and often challenging processes to combine the elements of practice, science, and movement to scale agroecology. From these cases, lessons, strategies, and recommendations are shaped to share with others. This book brings forward examples of organizations of family farmers acting as agents of change, engaging in continuous agricultural innovation, rather than as passive recipients and consumers of inputs. They contribute to the creation of healthier farming and food systems, as well as to more democratic, just, and sustainable societies.