If someone is serious about a critique of modern agriculture, “monoculture” is not the best term to use – particularly if you want to communicate with farmers. The real issue is the difference between “diverse rotations” and “non-diverse rotations.”
Yup, that’s going to work.
Steve Savage offers his interpretation of the word, and how not to use it if you “are being critical of mainstream farming”. As I noted on his blog, I’m not about to do a point-by-point rebuttal. Life’s too short. And language is alive. But if that photograph of “a 700+ year-old farming system in China” is a monoculture, I’m a cantankerous nutcase with a blog to prove it.
Jeremy,
Sorry you don’t like my terminology, but what about my point that patterns of land ownership and the short-term orientation of cash rent leases? That is not only what drives farmers to only plant certain crops in a given area, it also keeps them from making long-term investments like no-till and cover cropping. Rather than demonizing farmers with emotive terms like “mono-culture” what about considering how to get the land owners (mostly ex-farming families in cities) to take a long-term view of their land?
Thanks for your comment, Steve.
It isn’t that I don’t like your terminology. Rather, I think that it would broaden the discussion, and possibly help people understand it, if one thought of monoculture as applying more to genetically uniform stands of a single species than to the genetically diverse stands of single species that characterise traditional farming systems. That at least gives you a way to begin to talk about the role of diversity. Furthermore, “modern” farmers, growing for market, are increasingly using crop mixtures in this way.
I don’t see “monoculture” as demonizing anyone. I do see it as requiring the kinds of additional inputs that perhaps prevent taking a longer-term view.
Monoculture was defined as ‘the growing of a single plant species in one area, usually the same type of crop grown year after year’ in Elsevier’s Dictionary of Plant Genetic Resources. IBPGR, Rome (1991). The last bit is Steve’s concern – the lack of rotation. But the first bit does not address within-species variation – your concern.
There is certainly confusion now over usage and demonizing (we only need to think of Vandana Shiva who targets ‘industrialized’ agriculture of genetically uniform crops).
But it is impossible to draw a clear line between modern and traditional crops for genetic variation: it depends a lot on the intensity of selection. For example:
I have seen an old farmer in Sierra Leone growing 17 different varieties of rice in plots in one field, each apparently uniform, yet visibly different from other plots (and goodness knows what the genetic differences were). On the IBPGR definition the whole field was a rice monoculture. On Anderson’s argument the highly traditional maize in Guatemala was a monoculture worthy of the scorn of V. Shiva.