Jake - Chapter 3

 Arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi (AMF) is VITAL for plants, but is often not given the credit it deserves for the service they provide. The population of AMF was found to be twice as large in polycultures across the Central Valley, typically owned by Mexican workers, compared to the larger monocultures around them. This larger population in turn drastically improve plants viability and output. Heavily treated soil selects for less cooperate AMF as only the "greediest" of fungi survive the harsher conditions, which then reduces plant productivity. Monocultures that don't have legumes/nitrogen-fixing plants can get screwed over since they just don't have an ecological niche that they need, and it is both expensive and less efficient to try and do the job of nitrogen-fixing plants manually through fertilization. The book also mentioned volcanic soil that was able to be sustainably farmed with the polyculture systems that local inhabitants had come to develop for it over long periods of time, an example of finding sustainable, reliable yields in an area the main farm doctrine would suggest massive land transformation to get a good few years of crop production out of. They also mentioned how squash bees do better in polycultures as opposed to squash monocultures, as in polycultures there are other flowers still available once all the squash flowers die out, allowing the bees to forage for more nectar should they need it. This further demonstrates just how more advantageous polycultures are than monocultures in countless ways.

The book talks about how Mexican workers, especially mestizos who carry on various Amerindian traditions, would plant polyculture gardens or farms if they had more access to farmland, but these areas are understudied and underreported compared to the large scale monocultures throughout the rest of the Central Valley  (which in-and-of-itself is overrepresented in farm research). Mexican land reforms under presidents such as Cárdenas, Obregón, and Carranza massively restored power to the Mexican peasant class which would aid the land with their more traditional polyculture meant to work with the land. However, under Cold War pressures and new administrations, an extractive, exploitive land management system would come to stifle this movement, giving less power to those who know how to grow food the best.

Corn was encouraged to be hybridized as it could have higher theoretical yield, but had to be continually rebought which in turn limits and strains the peasant class. It also encouraged the loss of seemingly endless knowledge and variations of corn spread throughout the Americas, and the same Cold War political pressures pushed farmers across the Western Hemisphere to adopt certain policies designed to just pump out the highest calorie count regardless of the specific local agricultural context. This destroys local culture, soil sustainability, and increases dependence on political figures and seed providers for the purpose of increasing calorie yields. In order to "modernize" Mexico, political and economic figures would encourage the land to be redeveloped to be more suitable for a specific method of farming corn rather than uses different varieties of corn and other plants to best conform to the local environment, as the book mentions a 100+ year old farmer doing with a wetland slated for draining. This also ignores the fact that certain ecosystems are entirely compatible with agriculture, just not the agriculture that was being peddled by foreign powers. Wetlands seasonally drying out and dying leads to organic matter content that Midwestern farm states could only dream of having.

Local farmers who had been farming these sorts of wetlands would also plant Alfalfa for their livestock, which then brings in the question of where is the livestock in agricultural context? They're entirely removed from the system, when in nature all aspects of life are conjoined. We artificially segment different parts of an ecosystem into certain chunks and then separate them into different lands - i.e. a hectare of only corn, maybe a hectare of an annual polyculture if you're feeling particularly brave - but that ignores the millions of years of coevolution that took place and encouraged plants and animals to best respond to each other, something the bison of last chapter brilliantly demonstrated. Modern agriculture rarely accounts for animals in farmland, and just pumps calories out of farm operations into mechanized livestock farms, which in turns pumps their livestock into slaughterhouses to meet the demand of meat markets.

I'll wrap up my thoughts on this chapter by saying that the goal of sustainable regenerative agriculture shouldn't just be finding a system that works well here and rubber-stamping it across the entire world. The damage the United States and allied powers have done by exerting their political force across the world to spread the unsustainable mechanized agriculture seen in monocultures across the US is staggering. If we want to create a more sustainable future, we have to realize agriculture should work with the landscape, the local ecosystem, and the local people. We should be fostering/spreading ideas and strategies and not templates. This chapter demonstrated the negative effects of forcing a specific farming style across the world can have, even if done with genuinely good intentions (although I'm sure the seed distributors were more than happy to recieve a larger market for their product).