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Why is it that corporate actors prefer monocultures? Bees, green peppers, or computer operating systems? In any of those cases, is a monoculture really more se
by niels_olson 12y ago
Why is it that corporate actors prefer monocultures? Bees, green peppers, or computer operating systems?
In any of those cases, is a monoculture really more secure? Or just easier to maintain long enough to retire and hope the whole thing doesn't collapse?
- Houshalter 12y agoMonocultures are more productive. Someone finds a tree that produces much more fruit than normal, and so it gets cloned thousands of times. Or for crops that can only reproduce sexually, they carefully select the exact optimal combination of genes, and then use a hybridization process to create only seeds that have the combination they want. Sexual reproduction mixes up the genes and so the rare combination of genes that gives a much higher yield, is unlikely to occur again. This isn't an insignificant effect either, sometimes the offspring only produce a fraction of the yield of the highly fit parents. It has nothing to do with corporate actors. This has been going on for over a century by private farmers and government university breeding programs. And we can produce a lot more food a lot cheaper because of it. Not all is lost though. As our genetic technology improves, we will be able to deal with these issues better.
- panglott 12y agoMonocultures are easier to mechanize/automate.