While doing chores today at
the DoD satellite ag campus, we were struck by the idea that Normal has become
like Big Ag. It tends in various ways to
operate the way Big Ag does, most especially by its pronounced preference for
monocropping. Monocropping can have
certain advantages from a profit maximization standpoint. We here at the DoD satellite ag campus have
lots of field fescue and it is, to be sure, reliable and steady stuff for
making saleable hay. But you wouldn’t
want to monocrop farm fescue.
Different crops do different
work on the soil so the spectrum of nutrients a single crop represents will be
narrow and you risk wearing out your soil or needing chemical
supplementation. Monocropping will also
have all sorts of unintended consequences.
Out here at DoD-Ag, for example, the quail population radically declined
with the influx of field fescue in the region – fescue grows in tight clumps
the quail can’t navigate to establish coveys.
And perhaps most of all, Nature doesn’t much like monocropping so if you
want to keep out all her extras, you’re going to need lots of pesticides to
keep your fields free from deviant incursions.
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That cluster of tall white-blooming growth is
hemlock, the historical enemy of deviants. We here at DoD-Ag love variety, but all the same we’re not taking any chances and are about to bushhog that pestilence down. |
On our worst days, we think
Normal acts a lot like Big Ag. Many of
its formal structures and informal norms appear to favor monocropping: Its conferences, journals, and curricula
favor, sometimes insistently, uniformity, whether that be uniformity of
methodological approach, source materials, or demographic identities. Put more plainly, it excels at growing upper
class white heterosexual people, mostly men, who work with Normal sources using
“mainstream” methods. It also seems to
cyclically re-seed with more of the same, hiring most from a small clutch of
institutions, thereby performing something like a single-sourcing of each new
year’s crop. At its most aggressive, its
efforts at preserving the purported integrity of its monocrop can register like
aerial dusting of pesticide, a kind of indiscriminant removal of all that isn’t
fescue. At least it can sometimes feel
that way if you’re not part of the monocrop.
None of this is new. Small family farm types have been remarking
on it for years, objecting to the intellectual and demographic homogeneity of
Normal. But perhaps identifying Normal
with Big Ag is useful in illuminating the costs it incurs not to the individual
stray deviant plants but to the ecosystem.
Ag polycultures work best over the long haul precisely because variety
and, dare we say, deviation, infuse vitality into growing processes. They prevent exhaustion of nutrients or, to
translate the analogy, a kind of boredom, stagnation, and endless stale repetition
of topics, approaches, and perspectives.
What one sacrifices in reliability and familiarity, one gains in
variation and natural supplementation of nutrients that can make the whole show
better.
To be sure, polyculture
farming is more work. You have learn
about more than one crop to pull it off.
And you have to tolerate some complexity rather than immediately reach
for the straightforward and easy. We
here at DoD-Ag are trying real hard to use manual control techniques rather
than chemical as we fight off a variety of plainly bad invasive species. That means lots of labor, but we’d rather not
kill off those walnut saplings when we take out the buckbrush. In similar fashion, we’re studying up on the
myriad possibilities for land use. So
too, if Normal could become less Big Ag, it would have to ensure its much
vaunted “standards” and “quality,” not by aerial dusting of the
“non-mainstream,” the “non-western,” and the “unpedigreed,” much less the
“non-white” or “non-male.” (So many “nons,” so little time!) It would also have to cultivate curiosity about
more than fescue and summon up some courage for novelty.
