Even though the Green Revolution and modern agricultural production has created larger yields and alleviated poverty, the essential weakness has been the reliance of petroleum based fertilizers, as summarized here:

Some kinds of fertilizer have nearly tripled in price in the last year, keeping farmers from buying all they need. That is one of many factors contributing to a rise in food prices that, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program, threatens to push tens of millions of poor people into malnutrition.

I have begun to consider if it is in fact high time for us to question some of the basic tenets of modern agriculture and work to develop more sustainable solutions, and improve on the ones that we do have.

This will require us to abandon at least a little bit of the modernist conceit of what productive agriculture looks like.

This post about regenerative agriculture reminded me of something that I learned about last year. In a discussion on the nature of precision agriculture and monocropping methods which have been introduced to areas around the world, one point that was brought up was that plants might thrive in a less homogeneous environment. Meaning that, rather than planting a garden full of one crop(likely for export) one might be better served by mixing crops together.

It’s an old idea, but one that had been ignored by modern agriculture and never fully investigated as it was often assumed to be inefficient. Anyways, its an idea that is returning perhaps to the forefront of Western thought, and researchers have been looking into the idea of gardens as social network.
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