Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring… — Michael Pollan
Monoculture is the single most powerful simplification of modern agriculture, the key move in reconfiguring nature as a machine, yet nothing else in agriculture is so poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a vast field of identical plants will always be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds, and disease—to all the vicissitudes of nature. Monoculture is at the root of virtually every problem that bedevils the modern farmer, and from which virtually every agricultural product is designed to deliver him.
p. 225Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
There are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, then there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.
p. 79
Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.
I was starting to appreciate that the conventional journalistic narrative that usually organizes a story like this—evil technology foisted by greedy corporation—leaves out an important element, which is us and our desire for control and uniformity.
p. 226

