Modern Agriculture (out of class)

While reading Lindsay's post on Wild Gardens I was thinking about how when I was younger I heard a lot about the "three sisters" (winter squash, corn/maize, climbing beans) and how they are planted together as one to help each other grow, whether by supporting one another, or by replenishing the nutrients that another takes. This seems to be an ideal wild garden, much like the huge circular gardens of the rain forest that the Indigenous people there were growing, as it allows each crop to spread out together rather than attempting to keep them separated and having to use trellises or fertilizer to help the individual groups.

This led to thinking about how modern agriculture uses crop rotation, often with corn, wheat, and soybeans, which almost seems like a bastardization of the traditional companion growth method.  While this still helps reduce disease by making it unlikely that the following years crop will also be affected, it does not help slow transmission immediately as the mixed field would. Also, it seems far more artificial than just allowing the crops to mingle, but it's far harder to harvest an entire field of mixed crops than it is to harvest a field of just corn. The mixed crops might help with land use problems by making a single field more efficient, as well as possibly helping somewhat with the monocrop problem that I mentioned in class with the bees that involves moving them all over the country for pollination.