Yield is Stress

On the farm front, I have a fairly recent insight (that I’m still thinking about, like most things )

Yield is stress, by and large.

It’s either positive stress (excessive nutrition or nutrients) or negative (harsh conditions) leading to biological responses to produce lots more offspring quickly. In balanced, unstressed ecosystems, there still are individual stressors and responses, but by and large, the plant likely doesn’t have a need to produce seeds/fruit in ever increasing quantities. It’s a human need.

A question that popped up in my head — can food that’s grown in stress conditions be too great for us? I don’t know, or understand. But at a principle level, does sound like a question worth asking.

Can we create ecosystems that do not create stress, have a healthy amount of natural competition and produce a little bit of a lot of different things in fairly resource efficient ways? (Permaculture principles do try to push us in that direction, but I’ve sometimes felt the practice of it tends to battle the wild a little more than needed.)

Can we have a planet and society that do that?