Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry for food and non-food products. Ecological agriculture, working with nature instead of against it, was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of selected crops and domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in communities. According to research, humans started gathering grains at least 105,000 years ago, and emerging farmers only began planting them around 11,500 years ago, and sheep, goats, pigs and cattle were domesticated around 10,000 years ago. Plants were considered to be independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. In the twentieth century, industrial agriculture based on large-scale monocultures came to dominate agricultural output. Today, while the largest one percent of farms in the world operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland, small farms still produce about a third of the world’s food. Modern agronomy, genetic plant breeding, agrochemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers, and technological developments in replacing natural farming have selectively artificially increased crop yields, but in doing so have contributed to ever exacerbating ecological and environmental damage. Agriculture, rapidly becoming increasingly sensitive to the resulting environmental impacts is now a global primary cause of environmental degradation, such as biodiversity loss, deforestation, desertification, denutrification, eutrophication, soil and water salinity and quality degradation, and climate change, all of which cause decreases in crop yield. Genetically modified organisms are widely used, although increasingly countries ban them. Genetic monocultures, were seen as a fast fix, high productivity improver and while often referring to the production of the same crop species in a field, monoculture can also refer to the planting of a single cultivar across a larger regional area, such that there are numerous plants in the area with an identical genetic makeup to each other. When all plants in a region are genetically similar, a disease to which they have no resistance can destroy entire populations of crops. As of 2009 the wheat leaf rust fungus caused much concern internationally, having already severely affected wheat crops in Uganda and Kenya, and having started to spread in Asia as well. Given the very genetically similar strains of much of the world’s wheat crops following the Green Revolution, the impacts of such diseases threaten agricultural production worldwide. What is to be realised is that science and industry are smarter than this, but to identify the reasoning, follow the money trail.

Historic examples of genetic monocultures

Great Famine of Ireland :
In Ireland, exclusive use of one variety of potato, the “lumper”, led to the Great Famine of 1845-1849. Lumpers provided inexpensive food to feed the Irish masses. Potatoes were propagated vegetatively with little to no genetic variation. When Phytophthora infestans arrived in Ireland from the Americas in 1845, the lumper had no resistance to the disease, leading to the nearly complete failure of the potato crop across Ireland.

Bananas :
Until the 1950s, the Gros Michel cultivar of banana represented almost all bananas consumed in the United States because of their taste, small seeds, and efficiency to produce. Their small seeds, while more appealing than the large ones in other Asian cultivars, were not suitable for planting. This meant that all new banana plants had to be grown from the cut suckers of another plant. As a result of this asexual form of planting, all bananas grown had identical genetic makeups which gave them no traits for resistance to Fusarium wilt, a fungal disease that spread quickly throughout the Caribbean where they were being grown. By the beginning of the 1960s, growers had to switch to growing the Cavendish banana, a cultivar grown in a similar way. This cultivar is under similar disease stress since all the bananas are clones of each other and could easily succumb as the Gros Michel did.

Cattle :
Aerial view of deforested area prepared for monoculture or cattle ranching, near Porto Velho in Rondônia, Brazil, in 2020. The term is also used where a single breed of farm animal is raised in large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Many of today’s livestock production systems rely on a realistically small number of highly specialized breeds. Focusing heavily on a single trait (productivity) may come at the expense of other desirable traits such as fertility, resistance to disease, vigour, and mothering instincts. In the early 1990s, a few Holstein calves were observed to grow poorly and died in the first 6 months of life. They were all found to be homozygous for a mutation in the gene that caused bovine leukocyte adhesion deficiency. This mutation was found at a high frequency in Holstein populations worldwide, 15% among bulls in the US, 10% in Germany, and 16% in Japan. Researchers studying the pedigrees of affected and carrier animals tracked the source of the mutation to a single bull that was widely used in livestock production. In 1990 there were approximately 4 million Holstein cattle in the US, making the affected population around 600,000 animals.

Benefits of genetic diversity :
While having little to no variety in the genetics of an agricultural system can have drawbacks, increasing genetic diversity by introducing organisms with varying genes can divert them and make the system more sustainable. For example, by having crops with varying genetic traits for disease and pest resistance, there is a much lower chance of having those pests or diseases spread throughout the area. This is because if one crop becomes infected with a particular strain of disease or species of pest, there is a chance that the other plants around it will have genes that protect them from that strain or species. This can help increase crop productivity while simultaneously lowering pesticide usage and risk of exposure.

Monofunctionality :
Monofunctionality is an analogous concept; however, it is entirely possible for a monofunctional land bloc to have its function produced by multiple species and so does not suffer from all the same downsides. When industrialisation first came to agriculture and silviculture, monofunctionality was advocated as the ideal due to the significant initial advantages in economic efficiency. However, in the years since opinion has shifted away. In the years since it has become clear that monofunctionality suffers from some of the same downsides as monoculture, specifically forgoing synergies and failing to fulfill the whole range of human needs.

Embracing Solutions :
The way to embrace and deliver change is to locally become a part of the change. It is immediately to reduce all the excess carbon affecting the planet, but it has been demonstrated that it can be done. One consideration is that the conglomerates and inept governance permit trade-offs that deliver profits not solutions. Likewise as it is also improbable to reduce all the monoculture, limited genetics and chemical destruction in the name of productivity, but it can happen in a gradual methodology, a large element of which is companioning polycultures, which can be sustainably cultivated in high value transformations. This is especially in the rejuvenation of depleted and disturbed agricultural lands utilising SymECulture (symbiotic ecological cultivation) on small and vast acreage scales as a highly efficient, vastly reduced cost and practice methodology.