Application of Permaculture Practices to Improve Sustainable Agriculture in the Maltese Islands

Sustainable development according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) is set on three main pillars: economic growth, social inclusion and environmental protection ¹. The term sustainable agriculture thus implies the long-term maintenance of natural systems, whilst providing farmers with adequate income and society with food, through optimal crop production with minimal non-renewable inputs ². In tangible terms the three primary goals of sustainable agriculture translate into an effort to improve soil productivity through innovative agricultural methods, promote environmental stewardship by improving soil quality and reducing dependence on non-renewable resources, and provide profitable farm income in order to guarantee the food supply of both current and future generations ³. The desired goal is organic farming, as it generates a yield whilst promoting ecosystem health through conservative soil management practices such as utilising on-site resources, improving the soil structure and fertility, limiting the use of agri-chemicals, reducing tilling, increasing biodiversity, improving soil-water retention, intercropping, cover cropping, mulching, and crop rotation ⁴.

However, small island states face a number of unique challenges when it comes to sustainability and many of the solutions proposed for larger land masses need to be heavily modified in order to suit the characteristics of the area.

The Maltese Islands have a total area of 316 km². Agricultural land in Malta takes up around 110 km², with 12,466 total holdings (in 2013). Holdings are characteristically small scale (being less than 1 hectare), covering a total of 11,689 hectares. This makes up 75.6% of the utilised agricultural area ⁵. Of these, 45.3% (~5,300 ha) is used for fodder cultivation, mainly wheat ⁵ and 9.5% (~1,100 ha) are used for the traditional production of tomatoes ⁶.

Farming in Malta is predominantly a part-time activity, practised by an aging population, with the majority of farmers having only practical experience and no formal training. Agricultural production for most farmers is limited to two growing cycles (September to January and February to June). Farmers practising dry farming, which still might not rely entirely on rain, mostly grow fodder crops, onions, garlic, broad beans, vines, and olive trees. For most other kind of fruit and vegetable cultivations irrigation by drip or sprinklers is a necessity, even in Winter months.

At present the only drivers within the agricultural sector are increased crop productivity per area and reduced production costs. This is due to the fact that local produce must be competitive in price compared to foreign imports, especially considering that both distributors and retailers will be adding a mark up to the farmer’s initial price.

Given the poor quality of Maltese soils, in their effort to achieve high production, apart from a heavy dependence on irrigation in order to sustain their crops, farmers also depend on fertilisers to ensure optimal flowering and fruiting as well as the use of plant protection products to minimise losses in high density mono-cultures. This form of intensive agriculture, with its heavy dependence on agri-chemicals (synthetic fertilisers and toxic plant protection chemicals), over-extraction of groundwater in high quantities through boreholes (including a number of illegal ones) contaminated with agri-chemicals or high salinity, and impoverishment or complete destruction of the natural habitats surrounding agricultural land is a threat to the Maltese environment. Over decades of such practices, this has had severe impacts on the natural environment, resulting in soil degradation and impairment of natural biodiversity cycles, to such an extent that it has been identified as “the principle anthropogenic pressure in countryside areas” ⁷.

Though the situation is much more complex as will be expounded below, this clearly illustrates how unsustainable the current system is and these practices are having a toll on both the agricultural sector as well as the natural environment, where many compounding factors offer bleak prospects for the agricultural sector. Thus, an urgent need for implementation of sustainable agriculture practices has become evident, particularly in the context of upcoming EU directives.

It is imperative that traditional farming techniques be supplemented and improved with more sustainable agricultural technologies so as to create farming practices that are more adequately poised to safeguard the local ecosystems and biodiversity, especially when considering that on such a small island farmland constitutes a substantial proportion of the rural environment, thus playing a major role in maintaining a healthy and diverse natural environment. As a result, agricultural land does not only contribute towards food production but also participates in sustaining ecological services (such as air quality regulation and crop pollination) ⁸.

That being said, the option of organic farming in Malta faces several disadvantages since parcel size is small and fragmented, leading to a high chance of pesticide contamination from adjacent fields that are still treated with forbidden agri-chemicals. This is particularly so since due to its small land area Malta has obtained a derogation of the 100m buffer zone from conventional fields. A measure to counteract this issue is having tree rows as barriers, which can to some extent reduce the contamination coming from traditionally cultivated fields ⁹. However, vegetation buffers as well as rubble walls, which assist in creating such barriers from conventionally farmed fields are fragmented, mostly due to neglect.

The issues encountered in the sector can be categorised into those related to soil, water and biodiversity. These issues are closely interrelated and interdependent and do not only concern agriculture but the Maltese natural environment as a whole, considering the extensive rural land proportion occupied by agricultural land. This means that damage to fields permeates easily and extensively into the surrounding natural environment and greatly impacts biodiversity in the vicinity of agricultural land. This implies that ecological services are also severely impacted, permeating the life of the general population and requiring remediation for the country’s environmental sustainability.

Maltese soils are of three main types: carbonate raw soil, xerorendzina and terra rossa. These generally lack organic carbon (usually 1-5%), whilst tending to be saline due to their proximity to the sea and high evaporation rates. Furthermore, they tend to be mostly shallow (20-60 cm deep). All these factors taken together make Maltese soils less suitable for agriculture ^{7, 10, 11, 12, 13}.

Owing to prolonged intensive land use, Maltese soils suffer from degradation by erosion, loss of organic matter, structural deterioration, and contamination from excess nitrates, agri-chemicals, and salinity ⁶. Most farmers apply relatively high amounts of fertiliser (averaging 530 kg/ha on vegetable crops), despite recommended application amounts of 445 kg/ha. These excessive applications are partly due to the farmers’ limited literacy and partly due to hard-headedness where more is better, paying little to no attention to references for optimum use ¹⁴. The same is also true for the application of plant protection products.

In fact local nitrate levels (collected in 2011) exceeded the EU limit of 50mg/l in 11 out of 15 groundwater bodies ¹⁵. This trend has only worsened in more recent years, where for example the average tonnage of phosphorus and nitrogen used from 2007 to 2016 has increased by almost 91 and 15 tonnes respectively. This heavy use of fertilisers, negatively impacting the environment, has no correlation with agricultural training, as farmers add phosphorus and nitrogen indiscriminately, irrespective of crop nutrient needs, with the only goal of maximising production to increase their revenue. This reflects the traditional character of Maltese farmers, resisting science and lacking modernisation ¹⁶.

Maltese agriculture also has a significant challenge and limitation due to the scarcity of fresh water. Due to limited rainfall (averaging 500mm annually), spring and summer cropping is almost entirely dependent on irrigation ¹⁷. Water resources (both in terms of quantity and quality) in Malta are also under severe stress owing to socio-economic development, over-abstraction for agricultural irrigation and from diffuse pollution ⁶. Groundwater is generally over-exploited in terms of quantity, while its quality is deteriorating due to saline intrusion and nitrate pollution ^{18, 19}. Agriculture remains the largest sector, responsible for nearly half (46.7%) of all freshwater consumption between 2005 and 2013, followed by household demand (36.2%) ²⁰.

This negative situation is compounded by the fact that most arable land has become severely fragmented and neglected due to bad government planning, bird trapping practices of burning land using gasoline, illegal dumping of construction and bulky waste and no maintenance of rubble walls and wild trees. Fragmentation and neglect have reduced biodiversity, as indigenous flora and fauna species suffer from the loss of their ecosystem, thus allowing pest species to thrive. The use of pesticides greatly impacts a number of important pollinators including the Maltese endemic sub-species of honey bees Apis mellifera ruttneri, which is also key for local honey production, with Spring, Summer and Autumn honeys all having different organoleptic properties and health benefits. Another group of species that are particularly hit by this situation are bats, which are essential to maintaining pest insect species under control but are poisoned by bioaccumulation of pesticides ²¹. As a result of all this, crop production is stunted.

The EU has drawn up the Common Agricultural Policy which came into force at the start of 2023 and the Green Deal which sets a number of environmental, climate, and biodiversity protection commitments for 2030. However, the crux of the matter is how these are going to be implemented by local legislators for the betterment and sustainable growth of the agricultural sector in Malta. Local government policy attempts to address: soil conservation and regeneration, reduction in water consumption, use of renewable energy, promotion of indigenous plant species integration, increase of tree cover, creation of microclimates, increased carbon capture and increases crop, fruit and honey production. It all boils down to how adequate these policies are for the local context and how willing the farmers are to embrace them.

The relevant Government policy is covered in the The National Agricultural Policy (NAP) for the Maltese Islands 2018-2028. The NAP includes sustainability in its strategic policy objectives in that it aims to protect crucial resources and attempts to move the sector forward through numerous changes supported by local research ⁹. It outlines 6 strategic policy objectives, divided into 4 operational objectives, translated into 70 tangible measures. Four of the six strategic policies are relevant to sustainable agriculture i.e. 3) Sustaining water and key resources, 4) Competitiveness and diversification, 5) Adaptation to and mitigation of geo-climatic conditions, and 6) Research and development. The operational objectives are divided into 20 economic, 8 social, 26 resources and 16 governance measures of which 5 economic, 1 social, 13 resources and 2 governance measures could be supportive of local sustainable agriculture (details in Table 1).

Research is essential for such implementation to be successful, however as pointed out even in the NAP, agricultural R&D in Malta is lacking for a number of reasons. Primarily, the farmers (and other stakeholders involved) do not understand or appreciate the benefits of research. Another reason is that EU grants are not really concerned with small island issues and require projects to be multi-faceted, multi-level and ideally international in scope, making them daunting for researchers interested in addressing Maltese issues. To promote agricultural R&D, the Maltese government must dedicate an adequate and consistent amount of local (non-EU) funding over several years to specifically address local agricultural issues, commit towards tangibly reducing bureaucratic procedures and identify a functional alternative to public procurement procedures which when involving low literacy farmers, particularly focused on bartering services, is close to impossible to follow and as a result many prospective researchers give up. With such local funds available, higher educational institutions would be more likely to dedicate their scarce human resources and focus their research programmes to meet the critical needs of the Maltese agricultural sector. Finally, without adequate showcase fields, it is difficult to determine the expected rate of adoption of a new practice because farmers want to see the success in practice before deciding and are very distrusting of new technologies and changing practices.

Permaculture is an acronym for the words ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’, and can be described as a design system used for sustainable agriculture which mimics the patterns and relationships which take place within an ecosystem in its natural state, having its own natural cycles ²², with the ultimate goal of balancing ecological sustainability and economical prosperity. Holmgren ²³ embodied the idea of permaculture in 12 principles (Table 2).

In order to be sustainable, farming practices should be designed in such a way as to take into consideration the safeguard of the surrounding and interacting natural environment and biodiversity, since farming constitutes the major land use in rural areas and plays a crucial role in environmental sustainability. Towards this goal, permaculture offers a flexible framework whereby to tackle the local agricultural issues using sound scientific principles mixed with traditional practices.

Among the more basic and essential on-field practices applying the permaculture principles are: 1) reducing the use of plant protection products (herbicides and pesticides) and tilling machinery, 2) enhance the richness of flowering plants, and 3) changes in the crop species and cultivation system ²⁴. A meta-analysis showed that small-scale practices (such as including wildflower strips) enhanced pollinator richness, and that their effectiveness varied with 1) the magnitude of increase in flowering plant cover resulting from the practices, 2) farmland type, and 3) landscape context ²⁵. The best possibility to improve the situation for pollinating insects in the modern agricultural landscape is to enrich the remaining field margins by sowing various flowering plants, create new zones with permanent vegetation, and allow wild plant species mixtures as strips every so many rows within crop fields ²⁶. A priority should be to conserve and reinforce the vegetation features at field margins and their constituent wild plants such as nettles, wild umbelliferae, borage, wild clovers, etc., as well as herbaceous plants, especially the more specialist long-corolla perennials that tend to have more nectar than annuals ²⁷. In addition to pollen and nectar for adults and food plants for larvae, wild plants at field margins provide shelter and nesting sites for many pollinators ²⁶.

Having a permanent ecosystem in a commercial set-up is not entirely possible and is more amenable to small plots for family production. However, setting up a system in which a certain percentage of total land, particularly field borders, is dedicated to such a permanent ecosystem with seasonal succession is easily doable, since this land area is not generally used for growing crops and in so doing provides a buffer zone protecting crops from both pests and environmental elements.

From the perspective of crop yield and sustainable profit, research shows that the resilience of the ecosystem increases with a larger functional biodiversity. When growing mixtures of different crops, the system becomes more resilient to fungal diseases and pests, yields are stabilised and the sustainability of the system as a whole increases. Therefore biodiversity increases productivity and stability of ecosystems ²⁸. The implementing a various permaculture practices have been shown to be effective through a number of research studies which have shown an increase in crop productivity. For example in one study, an increase in insect (69 flower visitor species) and plant biodiversity improved crop yield, with the number of honeybees and other flower visitors visiting sunflowers being invesely proportional to their travelling distance and decreasing to 61 and 24% respectively, and species richness dropping to 57% of their maximum by the time a distance of 1000m was reached ²⁹. Another two studies support this find, with an increase in yield of several crops by 19–37%, when using honeybees as crop pollinators ^{30, 31}. In a study on blueberry production, a mix of 15 perennial wildflower species (that provided season-long bloom, increased plant density and floral area), increased pollinator insect abundance in the fields adjacent to wildflower plantings, resulting in significant increases in percentage fruit set, fruit weight, and mature seeds per fruit in fields adjacent to wildflower plantings, leading to higher crop yields and with the associated revenue exceeding the cost of wildflower establishment and maintenance ³². In studies cultivating wheat and soybeans, this yield advantage has been estimated at 5.4% and 11%, respectively ^{33, 34, 35}. In short, yield and profit could be maximized with 20-30% of land uncultivated within 750 m of field edges ³⁶. When combined together, such permaculture practices allow farmers to increase production and reduce losses, save money supplementing the soil and mitigating pests, all of which increase the farmer’s profit margin, even if production per area is not increased significantly.

Presently, permaculture in Malta is already being applied at a handful of small sites namely in Baħrija (North), Għajn Tuffieħa (North), Siġġiewi (South West) and Marsaskala (South East). In terms of published local data, only 2 limited analytical studies have been performed in Malta comparing permaculture and conventional agriculture. The first study qualitatively analysed the use of sustainable techniques in local agriculture ³⁷ and the second study quantitatively compared topsoil organic carbon content ³⁸. This latter study found that the conventional field had an average organic carbon of 4.7% due to the use of manure while the permaculture field had an average organic carbon content of 4.2% due to the use of compost ³⁸.

A local pilot study called PerMaVia is currently underway to help bridge the gap between research in permaculture concepts and sustainable agricultural practices and their application to the local scenario, encouraging the regeneration of both farmland and the Maltese countryside. The aim of this research project is to test the viability of implementing permaculture practices to Maltese agriculture with the available local natural resources. The collection of quantitative data for crop yield and various environmental parameters, as well as biodiversity qualitative data will be used to determine whether using permaculture practices instead of the traditional intensive single crop farming could improve environmental conditions in the Maltese context without jeopardising crop output, for a more sustainable agricultural sector. The research design involves the implementation of practices related to renewable energy production and use, soil cover and tilling, reduced water consumption, wild plant diversity and control as well as insect and bat presence. Crops will be planted in 10m x 10m plots surrounded by a 1m border of wild plants. The ground cover selected is mulch or 60% shade netting and the wild plants are controlled by an electric grass cutter. The staple crops selected are potatoes, onions and broad beans, although other crops will also be investigated. The data collection methods include photovoltaic inverted data logging, laboratory soil chemistry (including metals) analysis and on-site NPK readings as well as irrigation water electrical conductivity using an RS-TRREC-N01-1 Dr. Soil recorder (Shandong Renke Control Technology Co. Ltd.), soil temperature and moisture content data logging at depths of 5, 15, 25 cm using Drill & Drop bluetooth sensors (Sentek Technologies), wild plant diversity will be qualitatively identified, pollinator and pest insect diversity and numbers will be measured from pan traps, while bat presence will be measured by analysing the calls recorded with a Song Meter SM4BAT FS Bat Detector with SMM-U2 Microphone (Wildlife Acoustics Inc.). This data collection will provide the much needed baseline data for a typical agricultural land parcel in Malta on which to build future research. An improved understanding of how permaculture applies to local agriculture will open avenues for farmers to innovate their practices and offer new business opportunities.

Agricultural technology is always developing but in most cases the application to the Maltese context is difficult because these solutions are either very expensive or more suitable for extensive land areas, with high soil quality. What is required is a set of optimised practices built on local or regional knowledge, combined with modular, sustainable technologies that can be scaled up when required by the farmer. Moreover, since most Maltese farmers are non-technical people, the solutions have to be easily implementable and low maintenance.