Commercial Agriculture Is Detrimental to Biodiversity

Snaking along the border of Minnesota and the Dakotas, the Red River Valley has long been one of North America’s leading grain-producing regions. Blessed with fertile prairie soils deep enough “to bury a man standing,” Red River farmers have intensified their production in recent decades, and planted more and more of their land to just two crops, wheat and barley.

Such specialization is supposed to be the key to success in the brave new world of multinational agribusiness. Yet the last few years have been anything but bountiful for most Red River farmers. In the early 1990s, following several years of abnormally cool, wet weather, their fields were hit with unprecedented outbreaks of a fungal disease called “wheat scab.”

But according to Brian DeVore of the Minnesota-based Land Stewardship Project, the fungus is benefiting from more than just the weather. Many of the region’s farmers have recently adopted a “no till” cultivation system that is designed to conserve soil. Standard cultivation prepares the soil for planting by plowing, but as the soil is broken up it becomes vulnerable to erosion. “No till” reduces erosion by leaving the previous year’s broken stalks in place and planting through them. Unfortunately, however, those crop residues are a perfect home for the fungus in between growing seasons. A few decades ago, one solution would have been to let cattle graze down the residue, but there are few cattle in the region any more. Cattle production has grown increasingly specialized too; few of the valley’s farmers can compete with the enormous livestock operations elsewhere. So the fungus has its way with these vast, monotonous expanses of wheat, one field after another, year in and year out: that must be the wheat scab version of heaven.

The bottom line is that disease and record low grain prices have cost Red River farmers over $4.2 billion since 1992. Nearly half of that loss is directly attributable to the scab. On the Minnesota side of the river, wheat and barley plantings in 1999 were down some 35 percent compared to their levels at the start of the decade. One-fifth of the region’s farmers went out of business in 1997 alone.

Biodiversity in Agriculture

Such problems are usually debated in economic terms, but they are related just as fundamentally to the loss of biological diversity in agriculture. Biodiversity refers to the variety inherent in life—both the genetic variety within single species and the “species variety” within ecosystems. For most people, the term probably evokes Nature with a capital “N”—tropical rain forests, coral reefs, mountain wildernesses, and other untra.....



Hotspot Agriculture

During the 1920s, a brilliant young Russian scientist named Nikolai I. Vavilov undertook to answer a question that must at the time have seemed vast in its implicatio.....



Traditional Farming and Biodiversity

The biodiversity associated with traditional agriculture is no coincidence—it has arisen precisely because people have actively fostered it. Al.....



Impoverished by Success

At the same time that Vavilov was scouring fields for clues to the origins of crop diversity, another agricultural visionary, the American plant breeder (and late.....



The Green Revolution

During the 1950s and 1960s, the agricultural “Green Revolution” brought extremely uniform, “high input” varieties to the developing world. (I.....



Reduced Ecological Diversity

The industrialization of agriculture has also dramatically reduced ecological diversity in farm landscapes