#monocrops

Apparently, when people first discovered tulips, they were so intensely valuable and popular, that people would trade huge amounts of money, diamonds, or even acres of land, for just one bulb. People were pre-paying for bulbs that didn't even exist yet, they would pre-order bulbs that are not yet even made. One servant ate a bulb thinking it was an onion and he got jail time for it. And I mean they're all correct, tulips just are that good.

There was also a lot of, much sadder drama about orchids; I didn't know this, but they originally grow very high up in the trees, and people were competing for discovering new and rare species. These rare and exotic species would then be displayed in rich people's gardens. Because they became so valuable, poachers would go trough the forests and take almost all of the orchids in there, making them near extinct in nature. This was resolved by orchid gardeners carefully growing them, multiplying and sharing to the point where they were sold commercially, which lessened their value on the black market, so there was no need to pillage them from the forests anymore. Growing rare plants is protection of them!

The book goes on to talk about botanic gardens, herbariums, and the value of collecting and archiving plant material, which is then showing us the effects of climate change, and stores valuable information about what is happening to the plants. It made me want to start a herbarium for sure, I'm always stressed about the loss of local plants, and it's happening more and more as green areas are cleared out.

The book touches upon plants that people have found harmful, such as plants that people make drugs out of; she clears it out to us that these plants are sacred to the native people who grew up with them, and creating drugs from them is in fact, abuse of these plants, and offensive to the communities who hold them sacred, and use them in appropriate doses as medicine. The book talks a lot about plant medicine! Apparently the pharmacy companies have been learning the knowledge about medicinal plants from native people who knew how to use plant medicine, and then the pharmacy would make medicine from those same plants, and profit off of it, without giving any credit or profit to the communities they got this knowledge from, which is not great. But then the demand for this medicine would go so high, they would go and gather all, or almost all medicinal plants from the areas where native people lived, devastating their medical supplies and natural habitats. Book goes on to question the ethics of acquiring medicine in this way, and never informing people where it came from, or what was sacrifices in order for the world to have it.

Similar things happened with valuable crops that are grown in native areas; once the demand for these crops grew, big monocrop fields were established, damaging the land and the local ecosystem, killing millions of animals who lived there, and sometimes forcing people or children into modern slavery, in order to grow them. Coffee, cocoa beans, vanilla beans, palm oil; they've been described as specifically devastating for the communities and the environment. But the book doesn't condemn these foods at all, instead the author goes on to describe, what has been done to improve this. Instead of monocrops, which are devastating for the environment, people are now taught to grow fruit trees in the same fields as coffee, which makes the coffee plants healthier and stronger, and creates and environment where some plants and animals can thrive. I personally don't believe you should have only 2 or 3 plants in a big area, I think you need about 3 millions, but it's a progress from monocrops.

The author describes finding and helping the local farmers who found ways to healthy, natural and non-damaging growing of these plants, and she helped them sell it! She also encourages buying organic food because it helps if the demand for non-monocrop food is growing.

Now there's a section of the book standing strongly against GMO foods, and for some reason I never heard any arguments against gmo, I didn't understand much about the harm coming from them, so I was very curious to hear this. The author explained how 47 million dollars was spent just for lobbying for GMO, which explains why all my information on gmo was positive, and I remember hearing it was 'the best way to reduce world hunger', but the world hunger is still a problem, so it obviously did not succeed. But now I have a better understanding of what it is.

GMO foods were specifically developed to have pesticides inside of them, so they'd be poisonous to pests, but not to people eating them. The research on whether they're poisonous to animals showed that the animals who ate them long term, had their inner organs irritated, enlarged, stomach infections, and had higher risk of cancer. So it was not proven to be safe, but it ended up in the stores anyway; the author says that about 70% of food in american supermarkets has unlabelled gmo, which is scary to think about. She also explains that this is the reason so many people in america are now trying to grow food at home, they don't want to be poisoned by pesticides.

GMO foods were specifically designed to support monocrops, and to protect them pests; this worked out in creating more and more bugs that are resistant to the pesticides, and farmers have reported the appearance of 'superbugs', which are resistant to any kind of pesticide. There's now also 'superweeds', which are resistant to herbicide. The industry is trying to develop new pesticides and new herbicides, in order to counter these new problems, but it is obvious that they're only sinking deeper and deeper; monocrops are unsustainable. Poisoning the earth and the plants, and even the seeds, is not going to lead to the end of world hunger. Farmers are often ending up losing their entire farms due to new bugs that are now thriving because all of their competition has been eliminated by pesticides, they're now the only bug and they can eat up the entire crop easily.

The other problem of GMO crops is that they're spreading their seeds and mixing with the natural crops, making them into GMO crops as well. According to the author the canola crops has already been lost, now all canola existing is genetically modified.

I'm dissatisfied with this knowledge, but it's better to know and be aware rather than to be in the dark. The author suggests designing living spaces that have gardens in them, and encouraging local community to garden, as well as planting city gardens, where food would grow for everyone. She goes on to describe the efforts of universities and cities who already had built their own living gardens in order to support the community, and how it worked to create a more beautiful, life-sustaining, happier place. She even explained how having local gardens makes the crime rate lower.

So if you've lived in the countryside, or even seen a rural village on a map, you know how it's set up. There's a road, the area around the road is peppered with houses, and then behind every house, there's several fields growing grains, beans and potatoes. Most often, there's also a little vegetable garden in the back yard, and sometimes a few chickens, goats, or a sheep. Around the fields, there are forests, and every clearing in the forest is growing something, even if it's just grass that is set to be cut into hay.

It's clear where these people's food comes from, and how big of an area it takes to grow it. It's visible just by monitoring, that for one family it takes a field of wheat, potatoes, smaller area for beans, a vegetable garden, and corn or a similar grain for their animals. It makes sense, these people have inherited the land that can feed them, and they do it. The forests are used for firewood, but also replanted, there are new trees constantly planted, and only old, dangerous and rotten trees are felled.

And then you look at a city, and it doesn't make sense. The area is more densely populated, but there are no fields, no grains, no vegetable gardens, no chickens. So how do they eat?

The answer is – the fields are elsewhere. They're planted far from view. And the food is brought to the people, instead of grown where they live. Isn't that a bit inconvenient? The people in the city don't think so. They make a lot of money, and they can have food delivered to them. But what does it take to produce the food for a densely populated city? That's where we meet agriculture.

In order to produce massive amounts of food, enough to feed an entire city, you'll need a big amount of agricultural land. And, you'll need that food produced cheaply enough, so that when people buy it, there is some profit for you as well. So, you'll want to own a big area of land that is yours to do with as you please, and you'll need big machines, so you don't have to pay for human labour, and all of the profits go to you.

Now, the big machines that harvest food do not work like human hands do – they do not differentiate one plant from another. If you want a machine to harvest your field, your field has to grow 1 single type of crop. Otherwise, your harvest will be a mess, and it will take additional, expensive work to separate usable crops from waste. So, you create massive fields with only one type of plant growing on them.

I remember looking at big fields of wheat or corn, and thinking, neat! That's so much food growing! And it looks so clean and well grown! I don't have those thoughts anymore, sadly. The reality of a whole field growing only one type of plant, is now upsetting to me.

The thing with natural, wild fields is, they feed the wildlife. They have flowers that open even in the winter and early spring, and then continue to produce different types of flowers throughout the entire season, making sure bees have food all year long. They house different insects and good bacteria, they lure in birds, worms, ants, ladybugs, grasshoppers, butterflies, bumblebees, and all kinds of beneficial, lovely bugs. If there's a presence of water, you'll find frogs, dragonflies, and much more birds, who are there to feed on the insects and pick off the caterpillars. You might find a hedgehog, a snake, a turtle in there. All are coming because there are sources of life for them in that field, plants they can eat, or plants that bugs can eat, and bugs are then delicious resource to the animals. Bugs we consider pests, are also a great food resource for the birds and the animals, and their population is monitored and controlled by all of the other animals. Plants rarely get destroyed by pests, or they evolve to defend themselves, or to attract a predator who fends off of the pests.

Now, a field of let's say, only corn, doesn't do that. The corn is pollinated by wind, and the flowers of corn do not attract the bees. They do not serve as a home to many insects, and they do not make a good resource for the wildlife – until of course, they make the corn itself, which is then attractive to the birds. But they cannot sustain life for the entire year. There's only a short window when these crops can serve as source of food.

The area where corn will be planted, has to be tilled early in the winter or spring, making sure every life-giving plant in that area, is dead. Then, corn is planted, and then often weeded or sprayed with herbicide, if any other plant manages to grow inbetween. And they will grow, because no matter how hard you try to kill every weed, seeds are carried by the wind, by the birds, buried deep into the ground, some are capable of growing back from just one single piece of root. You cannot exterminate them, except, by herbicide. And that is what happens in monocultures – in order to fight nature to the point where you establish a monoculture, you have to distribute poison for plants.

After the monocrop is harvested, the field is left barren and void of life. There are no flowers, no food for bees, no hiding places for the insects to hibernate in. Some may hibernate deep in the soil, if they have not yet gotten poisoned, but most will not even bother, as there are no food sources in the area.

Have you noticed how wild fields do not get their soil depleted and  poor at any time? Year after year, the wild plants are growing anew, never losing nutrients, never lacking food. And there's a reason for this – the wild plants are left to wither, dry, lay flat on the ground, and then decompose. The bugs, worms, bacteria and insects in the ground use them as a food source, and after going thru their digestive systems, it decomposes and becomes soil again. This way, all of the nutrients, minerals and food they took from the soil while growing, comes back around, creating fertile ground for a new season.

But monocrops do not do that. Once harvested, the soil remains depleted, the waste products of grains are usually extremely low in nutrients, there are no bugs to aid composting, the space remains empty of minerals and nutrition the plants have absorbed. So what do you do to keep growing? You have to buy the nutrients and physically distribute them all over the field, in order for the next year's crop to grow again. This almost ensures that you will have to do this again and again, and that your crops will only be able to feed on whatever you put there, and will only have the minerals you yourself have put in the soil. The soil itself becomes void of life, because it's those worms and insects and bacteria that are keeping the soil alive and healthy, they're creating an ecosystem where plants love to grow, where a healthy balance of nutrients and air and water and compost and roots is kept. Your field cannot do it. You have given the soil nothing to live off of. There is only a single crop, and it doesn't support any life in the soil. It doesn't feed the beneficial bacteria, bugs, or animals.

But you know what it does feed? The pests. There will always be some types of bugs evolved specifically to feed on your crop, and once you plant your crop over several kilometers, you have given them a perfect food source, and they will not restrain from multiplying rapidly, enjoying what you provided. Your monocrop will start getting eaten at a rapid rate, unless, you spray it with pesticide. So you do, you have to, there are no birds, predatory bugs, animals, or any other kind of natural pest control that would do the work for you or stop the pests from multiplying uncontrollably. You have to poison your monocrop in order to protect it from getting eaten away.

Wild plants are usually good at fending off diseases, because they will cross-pollinate, and some will contain disease-resistant genes that ensure that the next generation of plants will grow stronger. Your monocrop, is carefully planted so only ever one type of plant is growing, same type of seed, protected from cross-pollination, same dna. So when a disease hits, there will be no resistance. Your plants will all get infected. If it's a bit too hot, or too cold, or a disaster hits, or a new type of bacteria attacks, your plants have no way of defending themselves, or evolving into a stronger, more disease-resistant versions of themselves. You'll have to develop a different type of plant on your own, and rely on chemicals again, to stop the disease, to save your plants. This is actually the reason why bananas as we know them, are soon to be extinct, and a new variety is being developed to replace them – they've all grown sick, and there's nothing that can be done to save them, except developing a different variety that will hopefully, be resistant to that disease (but not to a new one, repeating the cycle again and again.)

So, once you've secured your giant fields of monocrops, convenient for your big machines to work and harvest, you've started to notice that you have to spray the chemicals on your fields to fertilize the soil, then to kill of weeds, then to kill off pests, then to fend off disease, and you're in fact, spending a lot of money on all these chemicals that you are now completely dependent upon. And what happens next is, these chemicals start getting more and more expensive. Maybe the seeds prices are getting higher too. And now, you're in a situation where you don't have many options. You cannot grow the same volume of food without monocrops, and you can't sustain your practice with ever-higher prices it takes to grow in this unnatural, diversity-eliminating way. In the older times, people learned to rotate their crops, allowing the land to grow some wild plants and recover from the intense use of agriculture, but now you can't afford to own land that you are not actively using for profit.

This is why agriculture is getting less and less productive, and why we keep needing new agricultural land to grow on, the soil is getting depleted, and land unusable. This also caused by the wind erosion and sun erosion. While the crops are not growing, the land is barren, tilled, and left exposed to the sun, which dries the top layer, since there are no plants covering it, and then the wind dries it even more, dissipates it into tiny particles, and turns it into dust. Without constant and consistent rain – which is rarely available, the soil gets turned into dust. This is a hard lesson learned by the 'dust bowl' example, where the agriculture combined with drought created soil erosion so intense, the people couldn't see in the times of storms due to the dust, and would often get lost in their own fields.

Soil erosion and wind erosion can be mitigated by growing 'cover crops', meaning plants are allowed to grow, or are specifically sown in the times of year where the main crop isn't growing, so the sun and the wind could not deplete the top layer of soil. The plants also help keep the soil alive with insects, worms and bacteria, and keep moisture in, more effectively than the barren land could. Another solution for gardeners is mulching, covering the soil with a layer of organic matter, it can be leaves, hay, straw, pine needles, wood bark, wood chips, anything that will decompose and create food for insects, generate a protective layers from the sun and the wind, and keeps moisture inside. In combination with this, it's important to not till the soil. Tilling exposes several layers of soil to the elements and disrupts or completely destroys the established ecosystem inside. No-till and no-dig methods are protective of the health in soil, specifically for smaller areas.

For large areas, what helps the soil stay safe and properly structured is allowing wild plants to grow, which have deep, resilient roots. You know when you grow a plant in a pot, and you pull it out, it holds the entirety of the soil together, just with the roots? That is what the wild plants are doing as well. The deeper their roots, the better structure and stability of the soil will be. Deep roots can draw the water from deep inside of the soil and keep the moisture level even in a drought. Big trees are also a factor in keeping the soil structured and safe, for example, if you keep trees on the riverbank, their roots will protect the soil from being carried away and depleted by the water. If you were to remove the trees, the water would erode the soil of the riverbanks. They also protect the soil from getting blown away by the wind.

There is a problem of decreased availability of water. We have now extracted so much water from our planet, it's getting harder to find water sources for our crops. And there are thousands of kilometers of these monocrops, making sure that no wild life species can live in that huge area that was once wilderness. This resulted in many species being threatened into extinction, if not already extinct. Bees cannot live on agricultural land, because there is no food. And all of these areas are not being used to feed the people in the cities, no. The majority of agricultural land isn't even used to grow the crops for human consumption. The plant products that the people eat is about 20-30% of all of the crops we grow. The rest is growing crops that feed the animals meant for human consumption. And these fields need to grow crops sometimes for years, until the animal is heavy enough to be used as a source of food. Reducing animal products could easily reduce the amount of monocrops we need to sustain our food sources, by big percentages. But, we're not trying to do that. Instead, the demand is steadily rising up.

Thinking of this makes me wonder if big cities are ultimately, unsustainable. Growing food to be harvested by human hands enables incredible diversity, fertilizing with compost, manure, bone powder, fish meal, and rich organic fertilizers that can be distributed over smaller areas easily. No till gardens can preserve all of the healthy bacteria, insects, worms and ecosystems in the soil. Using mulch and cover crops to protect the land from sun and wind erosion, and to keep the moisture in, can stop soil depletion in those areas, and feed and protect the wildlife and life in the soil. Animals can be used as pest control and as a method of fertilizing – if you leave chickens, pigs, or cows to graze an area and leave manure behind, they will bring fertility to the land. But, you would not be able to grow the amount of food that would feed an entire city, not without it requiring a vast amount of human labour, which would make the food expensive, and unavailable to the poorest citizens.

But, we can't get rid of cities, so we have to keep developing healthier and more soil-protecting ways to grow big amounts of food, in order to create sustainable, resilient and secure sources of food for people living in all kinds of areas. Encouraging people to change their habits and eat less beef, lamb, poultry and animal products would help significantly, since the amount of food that needs to be grown would reduce by a lot. Encouraging people to grow their own food, in rich and diversity-preserving ways, also helps cut carbon emissions by a lot, since this food no longer needs to be shipped and transported. Having people understand how their food is grown, what it takes to produce, and what is lost in the process, might inspire them to change their habits, and put more effort into reducing waste. Because even after destroying all that wildlife and diverse ecosystems – 20 to 30% of that food is simply thrown away. Food that people grow themselves is most often, never thrown away, because then it is a prized produce, something they worked hard on, something they treasure. In case of a spoiled produce, it gets composted right back into the soil, making the waste non-existent.

Home grown food is often at least somewhat affected by bugs and pests, and that is normal. It's a sign of the food being healthy, unpoisoned, and obviously a great food source, since the bugs are all for it. I've noticed home-gardeners, who understand how pests work, feel skeptical about the store-bought food, just because it being so pest free is in fact, unnatural. 'What did you do to it, so the bugs didn't want it?' opens up the answers of how far one needs to go to make the produce undesirable and uninteresting to bugs. You need to go as far as convince them that this is not a good food source anymore. And the bugs acknowledge it, and go find food elsewhere. And we often have no choice, but to buy that exact same food.

Food grown for selling in stores has proved to be less nutritious, grown merely for the visual appeal, storage and transportation, rather than taste. This is why, after eating store-bought produce, homegrown will taste infinitely better, sweeter, with more intense flavour and noticeably better nutrition.

Today there are 7 billion people living on planet Earth. By 2050, there should be 9.2 billion of us. 40% of global agricultural land produces just three basic crops: wheat, rice, and maize. Also potato is increasingly grown. Rice is the most important of the crops, feeding half of the world’s population.

With the growing population, our food supply needs to double by 2050. Climate change can be a challenge regarding food security because it can affect our water supply and the likelihood of new plant diseases spreading around the globe.

Since the 1960’s Green Revolution, we have had a massive increase in global food production. This has been made possible by an increasing use of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, in addition to farming mechanisation and intensification. But the biggest problem with the Green Revolution has been the introduction of high yielding varieties of crops grown in huge monocultures over vast fields, also known as monocropping. 

What is the problem?

Alex Roslin gives a detailed account of what this transition in agriculture has meant in his article “Monocrops bring food crisis”. The article can be found here: http://www.straight.com/news/monocrops-bring-food-crisis.

“[The Green Revolution] meant dropping millenniums-old farming practices of planting diverse fields of frequently rotated, native-adapted crops that evolved as local soil and environmental conditions changed. Those methods based on diversified seed varieties and varied crops were developed during the earliest days of human farming in order to prevent plant diseases, pest infestations, and soil degradation.”

According to Devlin Kuyek, the author of the book ”Good Crop/Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada:

”The new crops were bred in government labs—and today, by a half-dozen large seed companies that control the bulk of the $30-billion U.S. annual seed business worldwide—in order to maximize yield, not other characteristics, like, say, nutritional value.”

”Because the new monocrops were poorly adapted to local conditions, the plants didn’t do so well unless sustained by massive amounts of water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Little wonder that almost all of the world’s largest seed companies, including the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, and DuPont, got their start as chemical manufacturers. ”

“All of a sudden, instead of adapting seeds to local conditions, the farm had to be adapted to the seed variety. The result of all this has been a tremendous loss of biodiversity. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says 75 percent of crop varieties have disappeared since 1900. Nine-tenths of the world’s calories now come from 20 crop species, with four making up half of total calories: rice, corn, wheat, and potatoes. “

“Soaking farmland with chemicals has had other impacts as well. It meant only a few larger farming operations could afford the astronomical costs of the new type of farming. Small farms were crowded out, making communities less self-reliant. As well, the chemicals produced environmental problems, like the explosion of toxic blue-green algae in Canadian lakes, due largely to fertilizer runoff.”

”Monocrops also deplete soil of key nutrients and billions of micro-organisms that help keep plants disease-free, reducing soil productivity 18 times faster than natural processes can rebuild it on average in the U.S., says John Jeavons, a Willits, California–based author and farming researcher who teaches small-scale food-production techniques. “We’re putting extraordinary pressure on our soil base,” he says.”

It is not hard to figure out that monocrops are not sustainable in the long run. As the global climate continues to change, there is no way to guarantee that everyone in the world can be fed by relying on so few crops.

What is the solution?

”Evidence is starting to show monocultures aren’t the only way to feed the planet—and aren’t necessarily the most efficient. “I’m quite confident we don’t have to do mass agriculture,” says Mark Winston, a former professor of apiculture at Simon Fraser University. ”

”Winston coauthored a groundbreaking study of monocultures published in 2006 in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and the Environment. It found that canola farmers in Alberta who let some of their land go fallow dramatically improved their yield compared to those who planted their entire farm. The reason: the uncultivated land became an oasis for bees, which, in turn, helped the canola flourish with improved pollination. ”

”With 33 percent of land left unplanted, a farmer’s profit would have more than doubled from $24,000 to $65,000 on a 1,400-hectare piece of land.”

“It’s a whole different mindset. Monocultures create pest outbreaks that are greater than natural predators [like ants and wasps] can deal with. In a balanced crop, natural predators balance pest insects.”

John Jeavons, author of the book ”How to Grow More Vegetables”, says ”mini-farming can feed a person a nutritious vegan diet with 4,000 square feet of land, compared to 7,000 square feet needed for a vegan diet with conventional farming and 30,000 square feet to produce the average American diet. ”

”How does it work? He starts with double-dug, raised beds tilled two feet down in order to create what he calls a “soil sponge cake” or a “living, quadridimensional tapestry in your soil”. Other tips: plenty of compost; close spacing of plants to reduce erosion, the need for watering, and room for weeds; companion planting; and carbon-heavy legumes to replenish the soil so it requires no fertilizer. And above all, no chemicals. “You’re feeding the soil and yourself,” he says. ”

”Jeavons says the approach simply revives techniques first used in China and Greece thousands of years ago. North American farms, Kuyek says, used to be hotbeds of efficiency and biodiversity before the advent of modern agriculture.”

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