It's called genetic diversity. Look at traditional methods of potatoe farming in Peru and the Andes. They breed thousands of varieties. Look up some pictures, it's crazy. Our modern method of high input, high petroleum leveraged mono cropping is highly susceptible to blight.
On the bright side, your potatoes would be less boring, because of more diversity on your plate. Now variety might not be enough though: many humans, but we still had plaques.
First, mono-cropping generally refers to single crop, year-on-year. It does not mean single, variety/hybrid as you suggest.
Second, your assertion regarding agriculture in the US just doesn't really match reality. USDA data[0] in 2014 indicated that only 16 percent of corn, 14 percent of spring wheat and 6 percent of soybean acreage is continuously planted with one crop over a three-year period. More recent data is available feel free to validate it for yourself.
You’re missing the point. Nearly all the corn grown and sold in the USA is a few varieties, and one goal of industrial agriculture is perfect uniformity of output. If you go look at Mexican peasant farms from 50+ years ago (and going back millennia), you’ll see corn of every conceivable size and color, differing broadly from region to region, and locally matched to each particular micro-climate. Same story for all crops grown traditionally in their regions of origin, which usually have thousands of varieties with diverse traits.
Whether they are planted continuously, or rotated with other crops, etc., doesn’t change the fundamental lack of genetic diversity in our modern industrial agriculture system.
> If you go look at Mexican peasant farms from 50+ years ago
The goal of modern agriculture shouldn't be to produce like peasants.
Their output was low, product homogenous, and crop was prone to catastrophic failure. All very bad things.
>e the fundamental lack of genetic diversity in our modern industrial agriculture system.
Diversity is a renewable resource. Even despite that, there already exists an incredible library of diversity breeders use to create yearly hybrid crops. The reason only a few types are planted each year is because they are optimized for that season.
Stop assuming modern farmers don't know what they are doing, and stop leaning on an authenticity bias of yesteryear.
I never said modern farmers don’t know what they’re doing. They’re very good at maximizing revenue (via crop uniformity and yield, marketable plant attributes, intense land use, efficient distribution, maximizing government subsidies, etc...) while minimizing input costs (especially labor).
This has been fantastic at reducing the number of people required to work in agriculture, and at producing more food than ever before on the same amount of land. It’s fair to say that our current world population would be entirely unsustainable without industrial agriculture.
There are big systemic risks and unaccounted external costs though (to farms and ranches, to the local environment, to people living nearby, and to the planet), in e.g. using water from aquifers at above-replacement rate; topsoil erosion at faster than replacement rate; large-scale use of a tiny number of plant varieties; widespread use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers which run off into local waterways; promoting crops with less nutritional value because they have improved size or durability or prettier appearance; feeding animals large quantities of antibiotics and potentially breeding resistant bacteria; et cetera.
(P.S. we owe an awful lot to hundreds of generations of Mexican peasant farmers. Corn, tomatoes, squash, pinto beans, chilies, avocados, chocolate, tobacco, ... they ate a substantially healthier diet than most people in Europe at the time and supported larger cities and higher population density, despite the lack of draft animals.)
