Monoculture

Quick, what’s the definition of the word Monoculture? Is it:

A.     A country with only one ethnic group?

B.     A lab sample with only one pathogen, or

C.     A field planted in only one crop?

If you said “C” you win the prize, at least for this column. “Mono” of course, means “one,” and the “culture” is the second half of “agriculture.” Monoculture can apply to animal husbandry as well as crop farming.

The practice of monoculture was long favored by farmers because it made for more efficient operations, especially as modern machinery came into use. You could plant, tend and harvest at less cost, with bigger yields, and that means bigger profits.

It's not that farmers are greedy, but who wouldn’t want to do things more efficiently? And to be fair, monoculture has enabled farmers to feed billions of people.

I remember one morning in 1961, when I awoke on a Greyhound bus somewhere on I-80 in Ohio. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked out the window. What I saw blew my mind. This farm boy from Maine had never seen land so flat, never imagined that it could be so flat. And it was beautiful: neat rows of corn as far as the eye could see, some running north and south, others east and west, with occasional small patches of trees shading farmhouses sprouting blue silos. Our rock-strewn 15–20-acre fields surrounded by unstacked stone walls, were quaintly pretty, to be sure, but this, this was real farming.

Those cornfields, and most of the ones you’ve ever seen, are a prime example of monoculture. To turn them into polyculture, which is the opposite of monoculture, you would have to widen the rows a bit and plant something in between – say soybeans. I don’t believe baseball players count.

A monoculture landscape can also be aesthetically pleasing, whereas modern polyculturing can look a bit scruffy. But beauty is only a surface thing – no matter what John Keats says – and the truth is that if you look deeper, into the soil, you find a different story.

The first problem with monoculture is that if you get a bug, or some sort of disease, it is likely to destroy the whole crop, since all the plants are equally vulnerable. The other big problem is that monoculture can lead to soil acidification, degradation, and soil-borne diseases, which ultimately have a negative impact on agricultural productivity and sustainability.

There are many historical examples of the ill effects of monoculturing, such as the great potato famine in Ireland in the first half of the 19th century. You’ve no doubt heard of that. A million people died, a great tragedy, and another million set sail from the olde sod and came to America, which in and of itself may actually have been a good thing, since those immigrants, however much they may have been discriminated against initially, enriched the population and advanced the human polyculture here, in both the A and C sense (see above).

Knowledge of the  benefits of polyculture is not a new thing. In Mesoamerica, it has been practiced for millennia; the indigenous people somehow figured out that if you planted corn, beans and squash (or pumpkins) together, you got more and better crops of all three. Those three veggies became known as the “three sisters.” (Not to be confused with the three Kardashian sisters, or, for those of you who may be getting on in years, the three Andrews sisters. These have nothing to do with polyculture, although they may have had at least some influence on pop culture.)

The corn, beans and squash sisters were synergistic because, as Wikipedia puts it, “The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.” Neat, huh?

Here at Union Grove Farm, we’re big on polyculture. It’s a major component of our whole system of regenerative farming. We not only grow other crops in between our grapevine lines, including wheat, barley, rye, field peas, radishes and other “cover crops” that help stabilize and enrich the soil, we also integrate animals into the picture. In just a few days, we will be welcoming 300 Katahdin sheep to the farm, the beginning of a flock that will graze around the grapevines, turning the cover crops, as well as any weeds that pop up, into fertilizer, and if they slack off, our world class sheepdog, Sophie, will let them know about it, in no uncertain terms.

Sophie can hardly wait for them to get here and neither can we.  Not that I necessarily believe in astrology, but if all goes according to plan, the sheep will arrive right at the beginning of Aries, the sign of the ram. Among notable Ariens are Leonardo da Vinci and Lady Gaga, and if that ain’t polyculture, I don’t know what is. So I figure the late March arrival of the Union Grove Sheep herd is a positive sign, so to speak.

When you come to visit Union Grove Farm, you can meet the sheep, even take a turn helping Sophie manage them if you like. It’s all part of the U.G. Experience.

(Coming next from the Little House, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Katahdin Sheep.)