Farms that create habitat key to food security and biodiversity
Full disclaimer: I&#x27;m an industry amateur, went with the WWOOF program for 6 months, have kicked around what it&#x27;d take to make a living in agribusiness, and live in Iowa where the farm reports are on the level of celebrity gossip.<p>The trouble with biodiversity isn&#x27;t about lower yield-per-acre, but more that it&#x27;s not the most affordably scalable. It&#x27;s not hard to set up and configure planting a homogeneous crop across a vast range of acreage, then hit each stage of the process (fertilizing, weed-killing, harvesting) with vastly powerful equipment in what&#x27;s effectively an array. It takes more work to create an interdependent system that uses nature to fix nature, but many communities have done it for centuries (e.g., the Mennonites).<p>The one risk of scaling is that it&#x27;s a short-term gain with a specific technical debt with the soil: too many repeat seasons of the same monoculture will create weaker yields from the decreased essential minerals for that specific plant. There are a host of existing solutions to this, with varying degrees of implementation and effectiveness:<p>1. Plant different monocultures in that location each year, though this isn&#x27;t so useful if the entire region is configured for a particular plant. Iowa may be better for corn and Kansas for wheat, for example, meaning the market yield will be diminished for functionally the same product.<p>2. Employ the ancient method of &quot;letting it rest&quot; by not planting it every 7th year or so. Cuts back on profits, but lets the land heal from simple non-use (e.g., bugs and birds do their thing). The article implies this one, but with strips of rainforest in the middle of the acreage.<p>3. Rotational farming with grass seed and ruminants. Roaming cattle are literally the answer to climate stability, for multiple reasons.<p>As it stands, farming at scale works that way because it&#x27;s been the cheapest way to get the most crops. There are only several ways to improve food availability:<p>1. selective breeding and (now) gene-splicing, which makes the food more resistant to damage, larger, sweeter, etc. at the cost of quality<p>2. government incentives for &quot;good old-fashioned non-GMO 
organic produce&quot;, since most people will <i>not</i> pay an additional $1&#x2F;lb for apples<p>The trouble with the article is that it abides by what I call the &quot;Fragile Earth Theory&quot;, which posits that any aberrant act by humanity could send the entire planet into a downward spiral that renders us all extinct. There&#x27;s enough scientific evidence to disprove that idea, but it&#x27;s not politically fashionable to argue it and not the hill I want to die on. The article is interesting regarding biodiversity, but food security is now more a political issue than a yield issue.