The development of modern science and technology is often accompanied by the aggravation of environmental pollution, food safety problems occur frequently, people gradually realize the importance of healthy diet, and more and more people begin to focus on organic agriculture and organic food.
People who have a rudimentary understanding of organic agriculture tend to think that organic agriculture is "agriculture that does not use chemicals". This understanding stays at the level of food itself, and is far from reaching the core essence of organic agriculture.
The health of agricultural products is inseparable from the health of ecosystemsOrganic agriculture as a mode of production, in addition to harvesting healthy and pure agricultural and sideline products, also includes people's attitude towards the land and the entire ecosystem, that is, the land on which we depend for survival as a whole.
The origins of organic farming
In 1940, the British agronomist Lord Northbourne first proposed the concept of "organic agriculture" in his book "Look to the Land". It means that it does not rely on the input of external fertilizers, but can "act like an organic life" to achieve material circulation and self-sufficiency within the system.
Lord Northburner.
After the rise of modern organic agriculture from developed countries, after a long journey of industrialization, they returned to the basics and began to set their sights on natural and pure organic food. Organic agriculture originated in Europe and the United States, but the original prototype of organic agriculture was proposed by Westerners to borrow wisdom from ancient China.
As early as 1909, the then director of the U.S. Bureau of Agricultural and Land Management, F. H King, inspected China's agriculture and asked "why the United States has exhausted its land in less than 100 years, while China has been farming for more than 4,000 years". In 1911, he wrote the book Four Thousand Years of Farmers, which described a primitive model of circular agriculture, based on thousands of years of sustainable agriculture in China. The book points out that the secret of the longevity of traditional Chinese agriculture lies in the diligence, wisdom and thrift of Chinese farmers, who are good at using time and space to improve the utilization rate of land, and cultivate land fertility by picking up stool from people and animals, returning all waste and pond mud.
The book "Four Thousand Years of Peasants" is still one of the classic works that guided the international organic agriculture movement.
The book "Four Thousand Years of Farming".
Traditional organic farming in China
Traditional Chinese agriculture is defined as traditional organic agriculture, which contains a wealth of ecological farming ideas, such as material recycling, ecological fertilization, and mastery and utilization of species relationships. In terms of philosophy and ecology, traditional Chinese agriculture is based on the holistic view of nature in which man and nature are united, and forms an agricultural planting model with sustainable circulation as the main feature.
In the early days, there were many rudimentary forms of organic agriculture in China, and even the development model was quite complete. One of the oldest ecological recycling agriculture models in China - Sankey Fish Pond is one of them. It is characterized by the cycle mode of "pond-based mulberry, mulberry leaf feeding silkworm, silkworm sand fish farming, fish manure fertilizer pond, pond mud mulberry", making full use of the principle of biological mutualism and mutual nutrition, ecological, low consumption and high efficiency, forming a peculiar agricultural landscape of mulberry and aquaculture complementing each other, mulberry land and pond are connected and dependent on each other.
The mulberry fish pond will not be able to grow rice depression to the extreme, to achieve the multiple economic benefits of "both benefits, ten times the crop", and the economic and social cultural form formed by relying on the mulberry fish pond is a valuable cultural wealth.
Sankey Fish Pond**.
The agricultural talent of the Chinese does not stop there. Removing the primitive ecological agriculture period, in the course of thousands of years of traditional organic agriculture, the Chinese have developed many sustainable ecological agricultural systems.
The "Bite of China" has been recommended in the "rice and fish" farming in the rice-fish symbiosis system is also a representative of ecological agriculture, aquaponics is a new type of composite farming system, which combines aquaculture and vegetable production, which are originally completely different farming technologies, through ingenious ecological design, to achieve scientific synergistic symbiosis, so as to achieve the ecological symbiosis effect of fish farming without water quality worries, vegetable planting without fertilization and normal growth.
Nowadays, the integrated planting and breeding model of rice and fishery has been expanded from the initial rice-fish symbiosis to a more diversified symbiosis model, in addition to rice fish, there are also rice turtles, rice shrimps, rice crabs, and rice frogs to choose from.