BIOFUELS: Say Yes to Crop Diversity
Monocropping is Risky Business
The symbols of agricultural success in many parts of the world are endless fields of corn, soybeans or wheat, with identical crops stretching as far as the eye can see. Unfortunately, that image is also a sign of monoculture or monocropping, an agricultural problem that could conceivably get much worse due to biofuels.
‘Monocropping’ or ‘monoculture’ refers to the practice of growing one heavily concentrated crop year after year on the same land, rather than rotating various crops over time. An economically attractive practice — playing off economies of scale to make the crop more profitable for the farmer — it can have severe environmental drawbacks.
Hundreds or thousands of adjacent acres of one crop offer an irresistible target for plant pests. They quickly learn the vulnerabilities of the particular crop and pest populations can explode beyond control in such an environment. In addition, the nutrients that would be returned to the soil through proper crop rotation and allowing fields to ‘rest’ evaporate under intense monocultural farming.
Long-time monoculture farms require large amounts of water irrigation, fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. This not only leads to poisonous chemicals dispersing in water runoff, but also to the release of nitrous oxide (NO2) as a fertilizer byproduct — 300 times more efficient in producing a greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide (CO2).
And the singular nature of monocropping — all the eggs in one basket — is risky business. One severe strain of blight in an ethanol-producing corn farm could spread through hundreds of acres like wildfire, devastating the farmer’s entire crop [source: Altieri].
Monocropping isn’t an issue confined to biofuel production; it’s been studied for years in relation to all large-scale food crop production. But since many popular biofuel crops, such as corn and soybeans, are also popular food sources for much of the world, we can assume that the challenges related to monocultural farming could multiply as consumers demand more biofuel.
Deforestation: One Ugly Stepchild
The growth of palm oil plantations, in particular, has led to devastating deforestation. What seemed like a win-win idea — demand for biofuel poised to spike, palm oil an easy-to-produce biofuel source, plantation owners with land ready for production — has resulted in environmental chaos.
According to some estimates, expansion of Indonesian palm oil plantations caused the vast majority of that nation’s deforestation in the late ’80s and ‘90s.
The regional nature of high-producing plants such as palm oil sets up certain parts of the world as biofuel gold mines…and targets.
If oil palm generates 635 gallons of vegetable oil per acre vs 18 gallons for corn, for example, it’s easy to see how regions well suited to such a high-yield biodiesel crop might be tempted to sacrifice the biodiversity of farm and forest lands to produce such a lucrative biofuel feedstock — and do it in a hurry.
Responding hastily or out of desperation to market demand in this agricultural arena inevitably opens the door to deforestation, monocropping and overplanting — with devastating long-term effects on soil, water and food sources in regions that are almost always home to the poor and undernourished.
In addition, the failure to properly plan for large-scale biofuel planting and harvesting results in off-setting, high-consumption production practices that feature the transport of feedstock with gas-guzzling trucks and draining and burning peat bogs to prepare farmland for more of the same high-yield crops.
We’ve already discussed the long-term effects of monoculture farming on food sources, soil and fresh water. While the devastation in regions like Indonesia resulting from palm oil production is really a combination of biofuel production drawbacks, careful planning must guide ethical, sustainable farming practices and conserve resources. If the ultimate goal of reducing emissions through plant-based fuels takes a back seat to market demand, expanding production will surely breed some ugly environmental consequences.
Alkane thanks Matt Cunningham, writing for How Stuff Works and Greenfacts.org for the content of this article.
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