Monoculture
Monoculture is when farmers grow just one type of plant over and over again on the same land. It's like if you only ate pizza every day, all day, instead of having a variety of different foods.
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While it might seem like a good idea to grow a lot of the same plant to make lots of food, it can actually be bad for the land and the environment. This is because growing the same plant over and over again can use up all the nutrients in the soil and make it harder for other plants to grow. It can also make the land more vulnerable to pests and diseases.
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So, it's important to have a mix of different plants growing on the same land to keep the soil healthy and help the environment.
Video
Puzzles
English
Take a Stance
Task 1: Create a drawing or painting that captures what you imagine a world full of monocultures would look like
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Task 2: Create a collage from food and drink packaging and labels that you think does not contain ingredients grown in a monoculture
Experiments and Challenges
Task 1
Try a food cupboard audit. Look through packets and food jars and count how many contain palm oil. Check to see if the producers are supporting sustainable palm oil production: http://palmoilscorecard.panda.org/#/home
Palm oil comes in two forms: unrefined and refined. You’ll usually find refined oil in processed foods like pizza, chocolate, coffee, margarine and peanut butter. And in whatever form, it is present in many foods in our cupboards.
To meet the need for this ingredient, huge oil palm plantations are farmed. These often cause deforestation, destroying large expanses of tropical rainforests. This includes the habitats of thousands of endangered species, including the Bornean and Sumatran orangutan, Bornean Pygmy elephant and Sumatran rhino.
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Task 2
At your next family meal, determine the percentage of ingredients from farming that use monoculture.
Monoculture is where one thing is farmed at scale. Globally, the most commonly grown crops using a monoculture are corn, soybeans, and wheat. But so too are almonds, apples, avocadoes, bananas, potatoes and many crops grown in large fields to help produce food more efficiently. Monoculture can also be applied to large-scale animal farming.
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What is also different about this kind of animal farming, orchards, and plantations is that they also produce the same thing in the same space year-on-year, which can be particularly ecologically damaging.
Weird and Wonderful Facts
The mass-flowering of single plant species is increasing the prevalence of bee populations infected with parasites
California's 2020 almond acreage is estimated at 1,600,000 acres, that's over 1.2 million football (soccer) pitches growing the same plant!
The bananas we eat now are almost all clones of one plant - they are from the Cavendish cultivar - and are being attacked by a disease that might wipe them out. This happened before in the 1950s and 60s
