Biomimicry

“Many pests tend to specialize on one host plant species, so when there’s a diverse mix, pests have a harder time finding their target plant.

free from the vicissitudes of hunting and gathering and learned to stock our own pantries. It accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, when we learned, in Francis Bacon’s words, to “torture nature for her secrets.” Finally, when the afterburners of the Industrial Revolution kicked in, machines replaced muscles and we learned to rock the world.

they were also looking for agronomic characteristics important to a farmer: reduced seed shattering (so seed heads don’t break open and spill their grain before harvest), uniform time of maturity, ease of threshing, and large seed size.

The trick is to start with crops that mimic the first successional stage (grasses and legumes), and then add crops that mimic the next stage (perennial shrubs), all the way up to the larger trees—nut crops, for instance.

Since 1945, pesticide use has risen 3,300 percent, but overall crop loss to pests has not gone down. In fact, despite our pounding the United States with 2.2 billion pounds of pesticides annually, crop losses have increased 20 percent. In the meantime, more than five hundred pests have developed resistance to our most powerful chemicals.

Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel reckons that society spends ten kilocalories of hydrocarbons to produce one kilocalorie of food.

Polyculture is not music to a breeder’s ears. When you are working in a polyculture, you take all the difficulties that you encounter in monoculture breeding and multiply them. You are not only selecting for high yields, large seed size, uniform maturation time, easily threshed seeds, low shattering, winter hardiness, disease and pest resistance, a

a process with lots of waste, as long as it’s “wanted waste,” may be better than one with a small amount of waste that must be landfilled or burned.

keeps us too busy to think what the real problems might be. Fertilizer, for instance, masks the real problem of soil erosion caused by a till agriculture of annuals.