Plant species don’t exist in isolation in the wild. their success is due to a complex interwoven matrix of natural support from other plants, animals, fungi and minerals. However in the commercial agricultural industry, we’ve predominantly grown our crops in traditionally fragmented systems. Only recently has the importance of planting adjacent spaces for pollinators, for green manure regeneration, and for better rooted plant systems of erosion control to restrict soil loss from farms surfaced. Unfortunately we are still looking at each aspect as an isolated problem and reactively addressing issues individually instead of creating an entirely new man made ecosystem. We need to use mother nature as an example for creating sustainable environments and construct a more naturally cyclical system for our commercial agriculture industry. This shift in thinking could effectively lower the cost to produce crops by decreasing the need for consistent human intervention. This new system could reduce the negative impact commonly seen to regional native species by requiring less land, less chemical facilitation, and more intercropping with natives for chop and drop practices and pollination encouragement. This change would also be socially favorable and culturally encouraged because it falls under the growing trend of going green and being eco friendly.
Taking a more proactive and ethical approach to land stewardship is so paramount with our continuous population growth demanding more and more food while balancing out the increasing environmental risks from problems like cash cropping deforestations, eutrophication of nutrient runs offs from a demand of higher land yields, etc. Playing catchup on environmental problems, public image issues for human rights concerns, regional productivity problems, and changing regulations is inefficient and costly. The first step is finding and defining existing regional ecosystems of the native landscape and then using those as foundations to create new adjacent man made ecosystems for local farms that exist in benefit to native populations. These regions should be identifiable by variables such as temperature lows, average rainfall, soil type, etc. While human intervention can extend growing seasons as well as regional limitations, it is accomplished at great cost and time investment and shouldn’t be heavily relied upon as these artificial support systems will be the first systems to break down in a crisis when repair technicians may be unavailable, materials for repairs may be hard to acquire, the local human population has other demands of the land or resources needed to maintain it, the property may be less accessible, or weather conflicts make these systems inoperable.
By returning our practices to mimic natural regional ecosystems, we move from treating problems in our current artificial infrastructure, to preventing them naturally and being in better balance to neighboring wildlife, plants, and peoples. We also incorporate many more important disciplines of study into our commercial agricultural system such as entomology, herpetology, nematology, mycology, etc. These additional fields bring in even further funding, and public appeal for inclusion. While this is a complex solution to bring life back to our soil, the initial steps are already being widely implemented in the industry today and several government organizations like the USDA and Fish & Wildlife, posses the startup research necessary to get the ball rolling.
