Healing Grounds Chapter 3

This chapter allowed us into the world of Aidee Guzman. She was researching the untold story of Center Valley agriculture. One thing she talks about is how even specialty bees like squash bees preferred polyculture over monoculture. The squash flowers would close for the morning but in a polyculture environment the bees would stick around to forage for other nectar, but in monoculture the bees would have nothing else to eat. Her main interest was the fungi that lived in the soil. She developed a DNA sequencing machine that would allow her into the world of soil fungi and find a fungus that associates with plant roots. It's called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, and it helped make an evolutionary jump from ocean to land. The plants and fungi would work together and thrive off each other. She was able to find that polyculture fields have twice as many fungi compared to a monoculture field. 

As the chapter continues, we learn about some history of farming. When the Indigenous Mesoamerican people domesticated corn, they would grow it along many other vegetables. They would create a complex three-dimensional structure of crops so the crops could thrive off each other and create habitat for beneficial insects. They called this polyculture The Milpa. It helps play a key role in regenerative diversity. There was also some information on the Mayans and their multilayered home gardens. These gardens had root crops, fruit trees, ground cover vegetables like squash, and allowed small livestock into those systems as well. 

Then came the Green Revolution. A man named Norman Borlaug would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for breeding a hybrid wheat seed that along with herbicides, irrigation and lots of fertilizer would double yields. It became a business model of selling new seeds every year instead of using seeds from what you produced. Besides what good does all the hybrid seeds do if you are using countless of harmful chemicals. Then the change of polycultures to just acres and acres of corn which destroys the soil. Throughout the years our agricultural system has really changed in a horrible damaging way.