Increasing the scope and scale of agroecology in the Northern Great Plains

Abstract

Agroecology is a science, practice, and movement that is gaining momentum worldwide. It aims to provide local, stable, and diverse diets through diversified, resilient, and sustainable agricultural practices (Ewert et al. 2023). However, agroecology seeks to address food systems issues by replacing large-scale commodity-based agriculture with something very different. Agroecology is typically discussed within the scope and scale of smallholder farming while failing to address the issues embed­ded in large-scale commodity-based agriculture. While we do not take issue with an ideal system where food is produced on small farms, it does not need to exclude agroecology applied to current scales of agriculture in regions like the Northern Great Plains (NGP), where agriculture consists of spatially extensive crop and livestock farms. NGP farms have internal sustainability problems and harmful social, racial, and environmental externali­ties that can be addressed with agroecological prin­ciples. Despite the problems, the large scale of NGP agriculture is not likely to change much in coming decades, and so there is an imperative to apply agroecological principles at larger scales to address immediate issues. We emphasize that applying agroecological principles to large-scale farming could increase crop and forage diversity, conserve biodiversity, strengthen cross-boundary and multi-objective ecosystem management, address regional food security, and encourage co-innovation with crop and livestock producers in the NGP (Tittonell, 2020). If agroecologists don’t address the immediate issues of NGP such as cli­mate change adaptation and mitigation, livestock-based protein production, unequal access to nutri­tious food, agriautomation, and pandemic food system disruption, then we may only expect industrialized agriculture to provide short-sited profit-motivated solutions repeating a pattern of the past.