MONO-CULTURE AS AN UNSUSTAINABLE FOOD SOURCE

With holiday festivities abound and with most people living in densely populated cities, we tend to depend on purchased foods. There is very little land to go by in urban centers. The high population growth coupled with market, trade and the investment sector demands precipitates a surge in mono-culture agriculture.  

Mono-culture has been the global staple food supply for the better part of the 20^th century.  It simply implies the growth of one crop species in a given area, usually over large tracts of land. Naturally, the farming of one food crop strips land of nutrients over time.  Of the 6000 global plant species cultivated for food, 9 of these food crops account for over two thirds of the global food production. This means missed opportunities to diversify not only plant variety, but our diets as well.

The underlying and most often overlooked element of getting our food through mono-culture agriculture is that it inadvertently promotes the use of fossil fuels. This is because of how labor intensive it is. From tilling land to planting crops, these processes are often energy intensive. Harvesting of crops is usually done by machines from whence it is then often transported to distant places for processing and sale.

The most sustainable farming practice that gives us food and preserves the environment is permaculture. Permaculture is a sustainable agricultural farming system which applies and simulates natural ecological processes.  It embodies using natural, organic materials in farming. Much of the labor is human with organic manure being the primary soil enriching agent. Low energy inputs in this case translates to less use fossil fuels. The icing on the cake is that by using the principles of agriculture, food can be grown anywhere, even on a space as tiny as a balcony!

By using permaculture, we can cultivate more food with less land due to the inter-dependency of crops existing beside each other , using different soil nutrients and in turn , preserving the biological soil cycle that would exist with naturally growing plants.