"There's no more bananas. I can't find any citrus, and it's all dry. And there's not many crops under the ground.
So, I asked the locals, and they said, "We had a huge flood that damaged a lot of the irrigation inlets, and now a massive drought." And now a lot of the rock out of the dry riverbed is getting taken to build roads.
They're still piling manure, they're getting ready for rain when it comes, and the water level to rise up, and they're actually pumping from underground to fill the irrigation channels, just to keep the fruit trees alive.
So, if this is a 2,000-year-old system, at a point in time where organic matter is dropping radically low in all industrial agriculture, and food shortage is absolutely imminent. We're going to have massive famines. We can't keep turning good land into a desert and let systems that are ancient and been running for centuries, if not a few 1,000 years, we can't let this lesson disappear.
This is the point when we have to choose, are you going to pay attention to systems that run on their own cycles of organic matter and fertility with very, very small inputs?
When I first started researching this system, they told me, 800 people farmed in this area, under this canopy with all this production. Now, the young people are moving to the city. There's just a few old people here, keeping it alive. The variation in climate, going up and down, from big floods to big droughts, all that we can work out, but we've got to want to do it, otherwise, it disappears.
I think we should teach a course here, with the local people, with the local community groups, and attract people in to save these systems before it's too late. And we should search out other systems like this worldwide, in all climates because these are the answer. And the extension of these systems through conventional agriculture are the answer to the way we repattern a permanent future for humanity on Earth in a way that's beneficial to nature. And we better hurry up." - Geoff Lawton