Uninvadable Agriculture?: Cubes, Corn and Creepy Crawlies

Today's piece represents a unique situation for Inspecting Invaders. That's because I'm not going to talk about invasive species at all, well, except to make reference to a lack of them.

In my previous post, I painted a slightly worrying picture about how invasive species are reducing agricultural yields, and how this is set to become worse in the future.

However, during a recent reddit procrastination session, I stumbled across a link to this article on how it seems nothing can live in a corn field apart from corn. And it got me thinking, is this uninvadable agriculture?

The article discusses stories from two interesting books. The first is A World in One Cubic Foot, by David Liittschwager (a portrait photographer) and E.O Wilson (a Harvard biologist) (cool tag-team). David spent years travelling round the world, dropping one-cubic-foot metal frames into all sorts of environments, and the species he found were documented.

For example, in a Costa Rican tree, the aforementioned cube was found to contain more than 150 different plants and animals.

A cube hanging out in a Costa Rican tree top...

...and the species it was found to contain.

Countering this, scientific writer Craig Childs, tells the story of species surveys in a 600 acre Iowan cornfield in his new book, Apocalyptic Planet. The results bore a stark contrast to the Costa Rican tree census. This is because corn farmers really really value their corn. Anything which may eat, hunt or even bother it, is killed. The corn is also bred to fight pests. the ground is sprayed, with stalks sprayed again. Cause you can't be too careful.

A corn field. Plenty of corn not much of anything else.

In three days and two nights, he only came across one tiny ant, a minuscule mushroom, a single spider, a single red mite and some grasshoppers.

Yep, not much here apart from corn.

This is even more stark when considering that these prairies were once home to a rich variety of species. Now they're home to pretty much just one living thing.

Clearly this is good for food supply, but is it worth the loss of biodiversity? My opinion is that if the loss of biodiversity remains localised, species invasions are prevented, and sufficient corn yields are produced, then there is no issue with a farm taking precautions to ensure its productivity.

We need to be careful though with what we apply to our crops with regard to human health, as this blog post by Laura Tamjarv on an Argentinian atrocity demonstrates.

That's just my opinion, as the use of pesticides and such like is a delicate issue I'd be very interested to hear any thoughts anyone reading this may also have.

Over and out

The Invader Inspector