Traditional farming – farming in the absence of fossil fuels, electricity, commercial seed, tractors and combines and other industrial inputs such as inorganic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides – has sustained much of the human species for ten millennia. And not just sustained: the global emergence of farming led to a thousand-fold increase in the size of the human population by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century (Cohen, 1995: 96). Traditional farming provided the foundation for early civilizations, cities and states, all of which evolved along with it. By some estimates, traditional farming or something very like it was still feeding a third of the world’s people in the second half of the twentieth century (Haswell, 1973).