Why Gardening is the Future

Posted on 25th March, 2026 in News

Few people can have been the object of so much ridicule as the enthusiasts of self-sufficiency. From Tom and Barbara Good in the BBC TV series The Good Life in the 1970’s and our current king, to today’s disciples of permaculture, they have always been seen as ridiculous cranks, whose ideas have no place in the modern world. Critics scoff that they are surely deluded if they think that small-scale gardens could ever replace intensive agriculture, and that we could feed ourselves by adopting their primitive form of husbandry. Experts all seem to agree that the best way forward is to press on with the high-tech solutions that since the end of the Second World War have doubled yields of the world’s staple crops – cereals. Proponents of this view insist that the future lies in two technologies: the genetic manipulation of these crop plants to increase their rates of photosynthesis, increase their protein content, and improve their resistance to pests and diseases and tolerance to salt and drought; and the development of computer-controlled precision husbandry to optimise the use of fertilisers and pesticides.

All of this is based on the widespread assumption that cereals are the best possible of all crops. It’s an easy assumption to accept since cereal farming has swept across the globe, and three cereals, rice, wheat and maize, make up over 50% of the calories we consume. On the other hand the supposed superiority of cereals is contradicted by one inconvenient fact. People who grow their own food, in their gardens, allotments or smallholdings, rarely grow cereals, especially the main old world crops, wheat and barley. And children never raid fields of cereals as they do gardens or orchards. To understand the reasons for this contradiction, we need to look more closely at the history of agriculture, to investigate how it developed and how this in turn affected the progress of civilisation. We will see that knowing this can help us come up with an alternative way of feeding the world.

Historians usually trace the beginning of agriculture (and civilisation itself) to three centres of origin: Southwest Asia, China, and Central and South America. Of these, the earliest was that developed in the Levant and Anatolia, where hunter gatherers started to settle down and grow early forms of wheat and barley, together with a few legumes and where they domesticated sheep, goats and cattle. Historians traditionally chalk the success of farming and the reason it swept across Eurasia in the ensuing millennia to the inherent superiority of cereal crops and to the ease with which their animals could be domesticated.

The blunt fact, however, is that archaeological investigations of the remains of the early farmers, show the limitations of their way of life. The farmers were shorter and died earlier than hunter gatherers and their skeletons revealed wear due to overwork. The problem lay in the deficiencies of their crops. As winter annuals, adapted to grow, flower and set seed in the short wet winters of the region, they are small plants with limited yields; it was hard work cultivating the large areas of seed bed they required to germinate; they needed constant weeding; they were difficult to harvest; and they needed to be threshed to release the grains. Even when it was threshed the farmers’ wives still had to expend a lot of time and energy grinding the grain and cooking it to make it edible. It took thousands of years to overcome some of these difficulties. Farmers learnt how to harness oxen to plough the soil; to fire stoneware pots in kilns in which they could cook their food; and to grind stone axe heads so that they could clear land more effectively. It was only then, around three thousand years after the first farmers planted their crops that the cereal farmers spread first across the Mediterranean and finally over Northern Europe. And even then the yields of their cereals was lower than people elsewhere were achieving using other forms of cultivation.

In Southern China rice, a summer annual that could be grown year round, produced far higher yields, the flooded soils where it was grown were easier to cultivate, and it was easier to thresh and cook. The food systems developed in the New World were even better. The people learnt how to grow a far wider range of crops which had higher yields and which were even easier to cultivate, harvest and eat. They grew a range of root crops such as potatoes, sweet potatoes and manioc, and fruit and vegetables such as bananas, squashes, tomatoes and papayas. Even the cereal they cultivated, maize, was a much larger, longer-lived plant with a higher yield than wheat or barley. The people could grow all the food they needed in small gardens, using simple tools such as mattocks and hoes, and they could grow different species together to avoid build-up of pests and to maintain soil fertility. The sheer abundance of food they could produce, and the high population densities this could support, explains the rapid flowering of cultures and civilisations in the New World, civilisations such as the Olmecs, Mayans, Aztecs and Incas. And the development of civilisation was not restricted to Central America and the Andes as we used to think; recent archaeological surveys of the Amazon, facilitated by  LIDAR investigations to peer beneath the trees, are showing that Amazonia was also home to vast cities, fed by gardens growing a range of fruit, root crops and wild rice.

So what explains the success of Eurasian cereal farmers? Paradoxically, it seems to have resulted because of the deficiencies of their crops that we have just noted. It set them onto an unstoppable course of technological innovation. Needing to reduce the energetic and time costs of cultivating the soil, they harnessed simple digging sticks to their cattle to create the first ploughs. And once they had learnt that the beasts could haul large loads, they harnessed them to pull sleds and made these easier to pull by adding wheels. And once having developed wheels they developed new machinery to reduce their workload: the potter’s wheel, for example and the wood turning lathe. And they found that they could also develop larger machines that enabled their animals to raise water, and for water itself to provide the power for their machinery. Having learnt how to smelt metals they could also fashion better knives, axes and chisels to improve their woodworking skills and build ever larger plank ships for trade and exploration. Eventually all their technological achievements combined to enable small groups of adventurers to sail across the Atlantic ocean and to equip their cavalry with metal swords and guns. This allowed them to conquer the vast but landlocked Aztec and Inca empires, who still had what was essentially a simple stone age technology.

The final paradox was that cereal growing Europeans only started to increase their populations, grow richer, and develop our modern industrial world after they had destroyed the more productive horticultural societies of the New World, And they did so by independently developing some of the same cultivation techniques. The Netherlands and England fed growing populations by learning new forms of cultivation – market gardening and mixed farming respectively – that used a wider range of vegetables and root crops. At first most of these were ones that they imported via Spain from the Middle East and China: turnips, parsnips and carrots. It was only in the nineteenth century that superior New World crops were finally used to feed the growing urban proletariat of Europe: sweet potatoes, maize and tomatoes in the South and potatoes and marrows in the North. These crops could feed people more cheaply and using far less land than cereals. In Ireland, for instance, the oppressed Catholic population was excluded from all the best farmland, yet by cultivating potatoes in small plots, along with the odd cow, they managed to support a population of over eight million healthy people until the disaster of the potato famine. Elsewhere in Europe. Residents of the expanding urban areas were fed by market gardens in the surrounding suburbs, the crops being fertilised by “night soil” transported out from the city, while fresh food was taken the other way.

The problem with today’s food system has occurred because we have reversed the advances in horticulture that were made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The green revolution that followed the Second World War sought to increase yields of their cereal crops by replacing compost and manures with chemical fertilisers; to overcome the problem of pests and weeds by using a vast new array of chemical pesticides and herbicides; by cultivating and harvesting their crops using huge hydraulically-powered machines; and by breeding new high yielding crop varieties. Cereal farming, vegetable farming and animal husbandry are all carried out in different areas. The result has been to double crop yields but at the expense of high energy costs, pollution, and soil impoverishment. And despite the higher yields, the overall efficiency of farming at producing calories has fallen because so much cereal is fed to animals to produce meat. The rush for producing cheap food is plainly unsustainable. It will progressively result in further soil damage, climate change, and deforestation, and as it takes over more land will destroy more ecosystems and cause mass extinction of life on our planet.

Yet all this is occurring while, with the benefit of hindsight and a knowledge of our history, the solution should be plain for all to see. We must return to the same small-scale horticulture that did so well for the gardening societies of the New World, Golden Age Holland and rural Ireland. Any of the many forms of small scale food production would be better than cereal farming. Aspects of regenerative agriculture, no-dig cultivation, polyculture or permaculture all have a role to play, along with small-scale animal husbandry or hens, pigs and cattle as of yore.  Experiments have shown that all these forms of horticulture can produce four times the yield as cereals with far fewer inputs of chemicals or energy, greater health benefits for practitioner and consumer. And all while it promotes far higher biodiversity and frees more land for rewilding. In the garden world of the future we could support a healthier, happier population while maintaining a healthy global environment.