The Problem with Monoculture Farming
We have asked people to read this essay and one of the most asked questions was what has this to do with sustainability. Our answer is that it has everything to do with it. Sustainability or lack of it is the cause of our climate issues. It revolves about how humans have become selfish. In our view it is because of big business. We have become blind to whats needed. It is our contention that if we drastically improve our knowledge and understand that all of us need to become massively more sustainable in the way we live, this is the only way to solve the current climate crisis.
Sustainability is about personal choice but it is created by big business conning us that we need the latest of this and that and that it can be got and cheaper and cheaper prices etc (this can be a contencious issue but if the world’s net wealth belongs to the top 1%, top 10% of adults hold 85%, while the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world’s total wealth, top 30% of adults hold 97% of the total wealth this need not be so contencious if consider who would lose in a more sustainable equitable world). This is why we have created this essay to show how various areas around the world like monoculture farming is doing more harm than good. By becoming more sustainable we can produce better products and healthier foods.
“We should take a lesson from the Irish potato famine: monocultures are vulnerable. Monocultures of any kind are very vulnerable, because one change and you’re cooked. So we should be diversifying, wouldn’t you say?.”
Margaret Atwood
What is the Problem with this type of food production
Monoculture causes soil degradation, reduction of the fertility of the soil. Modern agricultural monoculture upsets the natural balance of soils. Here we aim to highlight the the dangers of monoculture.
Too many of the same plant species in one field area rob the soil of its nutrients, resulting in decreasing varieties of bacteria and micro-organisms that are needed to maintain fertility of the soil. Permaculture design seeks to avoid any one thing – be it a species of insect, a ground cover plant or an extreme weather event – becoming too influential on a site, to the detriment of the other valuable parts of the ecosystem In contrast, much modern agricultural production is based on the opposite premise – cultivating monocultures. Think of vast fields of wheat or barley, plantations of a single species of fruit tree, or furrowed fields of a single vegetable crop.
Modern commercial agriculture often seeks to increase yield – and so profits – by cultivating a single type of plant. The theory is that the farmer need only provide for the needs of a single species, with its individual characteristics, in order to grow a successful crop. And the economy of scale allowed by cultivating a single crop boosts profits for the farmer.Monoculture agricultures negative impacts, must be alleviated if the ecological systems of the earth are not to be irreversibly damaged. There are some advantages to monoculture, but the downside massively dwarfs the negative aspects.. Here’s why.
Join the movement! Reimagine communities, integrate nature, and build a sustainable future with us.
Monoculture basically eliminates all Biological Controls . By this we mean that a there is a serious lack of diversity in a monoculture system. By eliminating all the functions that nature provides to plants and the soil, means that there is for instance, no range of insect species in a location to ensure that a single population does not get too large and damage too many plants. Nature works through the idea of complex polyculture where a a wide range of systems work together to create that Natural effect. Monoculture has no place in Nature Complex way of working.
By having variety in all of nature from the soil to land, Nature is able to supply a vast array of system to create ways that life has evolved and lives. Take for example plants, They naturally provide nutrients to the soil, such as nitrogen-fixing legumes, or ground cover crops that can be slashed and they improve the nutrient content of the topsoil. Monoculture (ie tilling and plowing) destroys the soil. This effectively reduces the number of microorganism species and bacteria in the soil (Soil needs cover othwise soil micro-orgasims die). As a result nutrients become unsustainable. This undermines the integrity of the soil. Add to that that most monoculture plants grown don’t have deep roots. This leads to the need for more and more pestitides that further decreases the soils viability.
Monoculture cause more Synthetic Material Use – Having eliminated the natural checks and balances that a diverse ecosystem provides, monoculture production has to find ways to replicate some of them in order to protect the crop (and the profits from it). This inevitably means the use of large quantities of synthetic herbicides, insecticides, bactericides and fertilisers. Which believe us is not a sustinable or health way of operating.
In attempting to prevent damage to crops by weeds, insects and bacteria; and to provide sufficient nutrients in the soil for the plants to grow, farmers use synthetic chemicals. Not only do these chemicals leave traces on plants that are intended for human consumption and so can enter the food chain, they are also routinely over-used so that a large proportion of the synthetic material remains in the soil, even after the crop has been harvested. Because of its inorganic mature, this material is not processed into organic matter by microorganisms.
Rather it leaches through the soil, eventually polluting groundwater supplies, having the knock-on effect of altering ecosystems that may be at great distance from the original location where the chemicals were used. For instance, inorganic fertiliser runoff has contributed greatly to algal blooms in oceans and lakes, the growth of which starves water bodies and the organisms that live in them, of oxygen.
Furthermore, such chemical substances kill indiscriminately, meaning that includes all manner of wildlife, beneficial insects and native plants are affected by their use, depleting the vibrancy and diversity of neighbouring ecosystems as well.
Changing Organism Resistance – Nature is, however, adaptable, and organisms are evolving resistance to these artificial insecticides and herbicides. Obviously farmers want to protect their crops, so new methods are continually being developed to combat the ‘threat’. More and more chemicals are used on monoculture crops which in turn, affect our natural ecosystems.
Soil Degradation
. Besides the negative impact the overuse of chemical fertilisers has on the soil, monocultures are detrimental to soil health in other ways. Ground cover crops are eliminated, meaning there is no natural . protection for the soil from erosion, wind or rain.
No plants provide leaf litter mulch to replenish the topsoil, which would be eroded anyway. All of this combines to continually degrade the soil, often meaning that it becomes useable for agriculture. In some countries this means that forests are then cleared to provide new agricultural land, starting the damaging cycle all over again.
Fossil Fuels – Due to their scale, many modern monoculture farms are more akin to factories than traditional farms. Harvesting is generally performed by machines, because the crop is intended for sale beyond the local area – sometimes nationally or even internationally – it requires large inputs of energy to sort, pack and transport. These functions – along with the manufacture of packaging itself – use fossil fuel energy. In combination with the chemical fertilisers and pesticides, the industrialised mode of food production is a major contributor to climate change. It is also an incredibly inefficient way of using energy to produce food, taking an estimated 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce just a single calorie of food energy.
At its simplest level, monoculture agriculture means a system that works against nature. Permaculture, however, seeks to work in harmony with nature. By putting permaculture practices in place, we can help to combat the harmful effects modern monoculture agriculture has on the planet.
Higher Use Of Fertilisers – Growing only one kind of plant on the same piece of farmland depletes and exhausts the soil by depriving it of the biodiversity, farmers tend to artificially boost the fertility of their impacted fields by applying chemical fertilisers. The use of such artificial nutrients has a negative impact on the natural composition of the soil, and therefore has a devastating effect on the ecosystem in general.
Water Use – With no ground cover plants to help improve moisture retention in the soil, and the tendency for land planted with a monoculture to lack topsoil, which serves to increase rain runoff, modern monoculture agriculture requires huge amounts of water to irrigate the crops. This means water is being pumped from lakes, rivers and reservoirs at great rates, depleting this natural resource and affecting those aquatic ecosystems. This is on top of the pollution of water sources by agricultural chemicals.
Economic Risks – When concentrated on growing monoculture crops only, a farmer puts at stake all the potential harvest from the given land plots and the reason for this is quite simple. Imagine that something goes wrong during crop development (exceptional drought, extensive rains, specific pest infestations, etc.) – there will be no chances that some crops will survive by showing themselves more resilient than others, as there are simply no other crops in such a case. Monoculture farms can lose at once all their harvest and, therefore, their income for the whole season, which is quite risky for farmers in terms of the money they earn.
Environmental Impacts Of Monoculture – In most subsistence farming practices, crops are grown and harvested to feed a family or local community. In monoculture agriculture, however, the crop is produced for commercial purposes, which gives an exploitative aspect to the whole process of using farmlands to grow monoculture crops.
Once the harvest is reaped, it will be transported long distances to a large number of destinations. In many cases, these destinations are international, which substantially increases the number of transport miles.
This form of transportation (whether land vehicle or sea going vessel) relies heavily on fossil fuels such as oil and gas which are among the main contributors to environmental pollution when combusted.
The use of fossil fuels is also considered one of the main causes of greenhouse effect in the atmosphere that has been linked to global climate change due to agricultural activities on the planet. As you will have read in a previous essay agriculture is one off our largest carbon emitters. Modern agriculture needs to change and quickly.
In Summary – Reducing The Effects Of Monoculture Farming
In general, the impact of monoculture farming depends on its intensity. By intensity here is meant the extension of the time period during which one and the same crop is grown on a specific land plot.
If, for example, a monoculture crop is grown on the same farmland year after year without change, it is considered as the worst form of this agricultural practice that has the biggest impact on the soil and the surrounding ecosystem. This agricultural method is also called “monocropping”.
Shifting Away From Monoculture – Despite some benefits of monoculture for industrial agriculture, the environmental disadvantages of this method of farming in the long run far outweigh its positive aspects. That is why it is important to move to smarter agricultural approaches and practices.
Although it may seem obvious, it’s worth mentioning that the best alternative to monocultures is a polyculture system. Polyculture helps different species of crops complement each other and make better use of soil nutrients.
An example of departure from monocultures in the EU is the “greening” initiative or “green payment”, which consists in providing an annual subsidy to farmers who incorporate planet-friendly approaches and methods of growing crops.
Let’s hope that such positive initiatives, both from official authorities and farmers themselves, will only multiply and lead to tangible positive changes in the agricultural sector all over the planet. While financial incentives may work, but what is needed is to develop knowledge and skills, so that farmers are equipped to develop a new way of farming. As we have seen forest gardens work on many levels (pun intended) both in terms of yields and also in supporting nature and its life forms.
If yields are comparable to modern monoculture farming there is no excuse not to get the message out there. Monoculture needs to be rained in, for the good of the environment and for our own health and well being. In its place we need to develop a more ecological sound, finically sustainable way of farming. The issue is that we need to change what we eat. However the issue is getting the message out there.
If the majority of people eat foods thats are based on sustainable farming and not based on monoculture then farmers will change the way they farm because it will not be environmentally viable anymore to farm in the way they have before. It will take both sides to agree with the money and there land to make the change, as well as those that eat the food. They can affect what is grown dramatically.Meet of fitness gym in the woods.