Biodiversity Feeds Us: Agriculture Around the World

Your plate is full of biodiversity

Think about your last meal. Maybe toast with jam, an apple, a glass of milk. The wheat in the bread, the strawberries in the jam, the apple tree, the grass the cow ate: each depended on many other living things. Bees pollinated the apple blossoms. Earthworms, fungi and bacteria kept the soil healthy. Ladybugs ate the aphids on the strawberry plants.

Agriculture depends on biodiversity, and farmers around the world, including Indigenous farmers, have developed ways to work with it.

Remember from Grade 3

In Grade 3 you learned about food plants, locally grown food, and how plants and animals such as pollinators depend on each other. Now you will see how biodiversity at every level supports farming.

How biodiversity supports agriculture

• Pollinators: many fruits and vegetables, such as apples, blueberries, cherries, squash and pumpkins, need animals to carry pollen. Ontario has many kinds of native bees, such as bumblebees, as well as honey bees, butterflies, moths, flies and hummingbirds. Wildflowers and hedgerows near fields give them food and nesting places.
• Soil life: bacteria, fungi, earthworms, insects and many other organisms break down dead material and recycle nutrients. Bacteria living in the roots of beans, peas and clover add nitrogen to the soil.
• Natural pest control: ladybugs eat aphids; birds eat caterpillars; some tiny wasps lay their eggs in pest insects. A farm with more variety around it usually has more of these helpers.
• Crop variety (diversity within species): different varieties of a crop have different traits. One may resist a disease, another may handle drought, another may ripen quickly in a short northern summer. Plant breeders use this variety, and traits from crop wild relatives, to develop new varieties.
• Many kinds of crops (diversity among species): growing several crops (polyculture) or changing crops each year spreads out risk. A pest that attacks one crop will not destroy everything.

Indigenous agriculture: working with biodiversity

Indigenous peoples around the world developed farming and food systems that use and protect biodiversity. Many communities continue and renew these practices today.

The Three Sisters (First Nations in North America). Many Haudenosaunee communities, and other First Nations, plant corn, beans and squash together in mounds:

• Corn grows tall and gives the beans a pole to climb.
• Beans have bacteria in their roots that add nitrogen to the soil, which helps the corn and squash.
• Squash spreads big leaves over the ground, which shade the soil, keep in moisture and block weeds.

The three plants help each other, and together they provide many of the nutrients people need. Communities save and share seeds of their own corn, bean and squash varieties, keeping crop diversity alive.

Manoomin (wild rice). Manoomin grows in shallow lakes and rivers. Anishinaabe harvesters in canoes gently bend the stalks and tap the ripe grains into the canoe with two wooden sticks. Grains that fall into the water seed next year's crop. Many Anishinaabe communities care for manoomin waters and teach that the harvest must leave enough for the plants, animals and future generations.

Potatoes in the Andes (South America). Indigenous farmers in the Andes mountains, such as Quechua communities in Peru, grow many different potato varieties, often several in one field. Different varieties do well at different heights, in different weather and against different pests, so some always produce a harvest.

The milpa (Mexico and Central America). Maya and other Indigenous farmers grow corn, beans, squash, and often other plants together in fields called milpas, a polyculture similar to the Three Sisters.

Saving seeds for the future

• Seed savers, including Indigenous communities, gardeners and farmers, save seeds from their own plants each year and share them, keeping heritage varieties alive.
• Seed banks store seeds of many crops and wild plants in cold, dry conditions. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built inside a mountain on a Norwegian island in the Arctic, stores back-up copies of seeds from seed banks around the world.

If a disease or a changing climate wipes out a variety in the field, a stored seed may hold the trait needed to grow crops again.