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to quote Ghost in the Shell "It's simple. Overspecialise and you breed in weakness. It's slow death."
monocrops are great on paper, but not so effective in nature. Once you get a richly biodiverse environment, the majority of the interrelationships tend to the mutualist-symbiotic, whereas disease counts among the parasitic. A monocrop requires constant treatment with toxins and fetilizers because it does not have any other plants to provide the protection and nutrients it would normally have.
Older farming techniques would see a farmer growing their cultivar, but leaving wild plants nearby to help bring in new genetic variations that may provide a particular strain with more robust qualities.
As for travel, much of the commercial fruit & veges we buy from far away are bred to withstand the rigors & even ripen during travel. Heirloom varieties are not, and as such aren't particularly commuter friendly.
Local agriculture is the way that we'll resolve this - due to the fuel crisis of the moment, the global trade in agriculture, rising food prices, and unequal distribution. The big step is for industrialised city-dwellers to start getting rid of unnecessary infrastructure to replace it with agricultural facilities. Like the vertical farm.
The industrialisation of our food has become the norm only in the last half of the last century. Before then, the exotic fruit (like dragon fruit) and processed foods (like corn flakes) didn't yet exist. People made it themselves. This has been one of the biggest travesties in global history (after locking up the food to begin with, and kicking people off the commons), and our food has been taken out of our hands and kept by people who's interest is in profit, not building a better banana.
I've been growing seeds from the foods I've been eating, in hopes of having fruit trees in a decade or so. I don't know what the world is going to look like by then, but hell, I'll have an orchard waiting to put down its roots, and maybe someone in the city will be interested.
in some locations (British Columbia's Oakanagan Valley), growers have moved away from growing edible fruit to grow wine-grapes, because they are more profitable. In another case (sorry, it's anecdotal), apple trees were cut down, because apples could be bought more cheaply from China than grown locally.
something about this scheme is just plain broken.
I love fruit, but have come to accept that a pineapple in Canada in Winter is just wrong. If I want the luxury of such an item, I should either have to travel to wherever it's from (under my own power), or do without. Paying $5 for a pineapple in Canada in Winter does not at all reflect the cost of the thing.
sorry for the rambling post - I've been thinking about this issue for some time, and don't have it cohered into a succinct post yet. |
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