The importance of agriculture

In some videos (linked below) restoration Agriculture lecturer Mark Shepard tells how to a) make world peace with our agricultural economy, and b) do aggredation agriculture (the opposite of degradation), and c) avoid the fate of every previous empire that relied on annual crops that degrade the environment, requiring conquest and extraction to continue.

This is beneficial not only because it produces more and better food, naturally, without lots of chemical inputs, and because it sequesters lots of carbon.

Some examples of civilizations that didn't take Shepard's advice (besides ours):

1. Rome had a permaculture agriculture like Shepard promotes in the days of the Republic. As the empire grew, farmers stopped working the land themselves, and got slaves to work their farms. The soil on the Italian peninsula degraded, and increasingly Rome, now the empire, relied on imported food from North Africa. When the Visigoths conquered North Africa, Rome could no longer get food, and the Western empire fell (that's the conclusion of the latest archaeology).

You'll hear that the cause of Rome's fall was Christianity (says, e.g. Gibbon) which made the tough Romans vulnerable, but if that's so, why did the Eastern empire last far beyond the West, even though it was still Christian?

You'll also hear that the Roman silver mines in Spain ran out, but the coinage was not valued at the weight of silver. The stamped number of monetary units was the value. So...no need to keep mining more silver for more money; like many other countries Rome could "cry up" their currency.

So...agricultural failings were at the root of the fall of Rome.

2. The pre-Civil War South farmed with slaves, which, understandably, don't care for the soil. After exhausting the soil where they farmed, the plantations needed new soil to mine. The Civil War began with a dispute about whether the new western states would be slave or free. In this case, the plantations lost.

3. The Chinese were the greatest civilization ever, anticipating all kinds of Western discoveries from gunpowder to moveable type. This was true even for basic sciences like astronomy and mathematics. Yet they ended up under the heel of the gunboat diplomats. How did that happen? One explanation: The new world crops (primarily sweet potatoes) let them cultivate previously fallow land, ultimately degrading their soil. The collapse of their agriculture weakend the Chinese, so Westerners took advantage, and made Chinese colonies (Hong Kong, Macao, etc.).

This implies that agriculture is one of the basic systems that must work before civilization can exist. Shepard elaborates about how our concept-driven agriculture has failed, and suggests a positive alternative that could succeed in two videos (and many more if you search YouTube):

Medium

Long

Worth the effort to see.