POLYCULTURE







The term “polyculture” distinguishes multiple cropping situations from monoculture cropping and indicates that an area is being used for more than one crop at a time. Diversity is the key to polyculture. Polyculture places an ecological framework to the growing of more than one crop at a time in one place. The subtle interplay between complementarity and competition is an essential feature of polyculture, as it is in natural ecosystems.

Food production has always been primarily polycultural, from primitive hunting and gathering to current third world house gardens and managed agroforests. For 98.5 % of farming history, humans have produced food from integrated polycultures. In both the first and third world, polyculture practices remain important and the majority of current world farmers depend on multi-species production for their livelihood.

The line of thought among modern economists has been that small scale, self –reliant farming is wrong- that it is a primitive kind of agriculture – one that should be eliminated as quickly as possible. It has been believed that the area of each field must be expanded to handle the changeover to large scale agriculture. The goal is to have only a few people in farming. The agricultural authorities advised that fewer people, using large modern machinery could get greater yields from the same acreage. This is considered agricultural progress.

In Australia this transformation has been going on for over half a century.  It became particularly acute after World War II when massive restructuring in agriculture contributed to a massive decline in farm jobs between 1950 and 2000 - a rural exodus. In 1911, 43% of Australians lived in rural areas, whereas by the start of the 21st century  only 2.1% of the population remained involved in agriculture.

Throughout the western world numerous policies were created with the goal of transforming the peasantry from what were seen as "isolated, subsistence producers" into "food producers for the nation".  There was an underlying assumption of an evolutionary advancement in society that shaped the direction of all of Western agriculture by defining the persistence of small-scale family farms as traditional and by reinforcing the assumption that large-scale forms of farming were more advanced.  In this light, peasants were seen as static, unchanging entities that only stood in the way of progress. Agricultural modernization was defined as transforming subsistence polyculture into specialized production for a market economy: mechanizing work, advancing technology, and consolidating farms. 

Farmers around the world are increasingly facing pressure to "modernize," to undergo a profound shift from primarily subsistence polyculture to specialized market production and to replace human labour with capital-intensive, high-energy technologies. This continues to occur, despite the extensive evidence already present regarding the failure of industrial monocultural approaches to provide for ecologically sustainable land use. No doubt we are all well aware of the fossil fuel energy reliance, net energy imbalance, environmental impacts, rural decline, and food quality issues that have emerged.

Industrialized farms produce most of the food of international commerce. The problem with polyculture is the difficulty with the mechanization of planting, weed control, and harvesting.  Additionally, farmers really need to understand how their crops function ecologically in order for it to be successful.  Monoculture allows for large machines to aid in the mechanization of planting, weed control, and harvesting, and less knowledge about the actual plants is needed for it to work.

It has been found that polycultures are more efficient at gathering the essential requirements of light, water, and nutrients than monocultures, particularly when tree based. Extensive individual case studies and broader review papers provide evidence that polycultures yield more from smaller areas and as an approach to agricultural intensification they suffer less than energy, gene, or expertise intensive strategies to increase production. Their yield is more stable over space and time than monocultures in terms of income level, stability and risk. Diversity provides pest management, nutrient cycling, a greater variety of resource use, production of diverse foods and a decrease in the risk of loss due to abrupt changes of the terms of trade in regard to specific crops. Polyculture is sustainable because it recycles and reuses all of its resources in order to be as efficient as possible with its resources.

Monocultures are favoured by corporations because labor requirements are minimized. Polycultures were seen as more difficult to manage under existing mechanization regimes. Greater labour requirements for polyculture are viewed as an obstacle rather than an employment opportunity. Our current form of agribusiness is a textbook case of design maximizing the advantage of capital to the disadvantage of labor facilitated by the artificially low cost of energy.

The other reason is control of the market. It is now estimated that 80 percent of the world's arable agricultural land is now in the hands of the corporations. It has served their interests to intensify land ownership in order to acquire as much of the means of production as possible. This has also facilitated control of food distribution.

In Tasmania the duopoly of Coles and Woolworths dominates food distribution in the state and corporations such as Simplot, McCains, Edgells etc. are now in a position where they not only dictate prices but also the production methods to which producers must conform. Meanwhile managed investment schemes are funding the conversion of family farms and freehold agricultural land to corporate owned eucalyptus plantations.

Cash cropping is a recent development in agriculture.  Traditionally farming has been subsistence orientated. Since subsistence farming is more diversified and on a smaller scale, it is less vulnerable to natural disasters and the risk of loss due to changes in the terms of trade in regard to produce. Greater rural population density and localized and diversified market economies are characteristic of subsistence economies.

There are just under six billion humans on the planet at the moment, and the population is increasing exponentially. At the moment, if we divided the biologically productive land up equally amongst all the people on the earth we would each have one and a half (1.5) hectares to support a lifestyle. However, it has been estimated that it takes 7 hectares of biologically productive land of many different categories all over the surface of the earth, dedicated exclusively to the support of the average individual Australian, to maintain our lifestyle. The average Australian lifestyle requires the taking of much more than our fair share. In fact, in order to bring everyone on the planet to the same general level of consumption and well being as the average Australian, we would need four or five more earths.

Cash cropping may be viewed as having given rise to the coveting of an ever higher standard of living. Yet the agenda of economic expansionism in a world of finite resources is illogical. The social consequences of re-orientating agriculture towards cash cropping has been the disintegration of rural communities and the radical increase in urban density.

Sustainability requires the development of values that are consistent with less consumption, less transport of goods, a more diverse economic base within regions and more equitable distribution. Efforts need to be made to re-localise economies and generate self reliance.

Traditional subsistence orientated polyculture offers us the possibility of a revival of rural community and the understanding of farming as a culture, a lifestyle. Economic considerations give way to regard for quality of life. With agriculture we encounter a solution to the cultural, social and environmental dissolution currently being witnessed.