How to democratise agriculture?
You can’t have sustainability without diversity. It doesn’t matter what area of life we look at, diversity makes things more resilient and successful for more people over the long term.
For example, diverse pastures of perennial and annual grasses, legumes and herbs all working together.
The legumes providing nitrogen to the other plants, some plants do better when it’s wet, other plants withstand the dry. The mix of flowers and leaf types attract a mix of insects and bees, which, in turn, attract a mixture of bird life.
The mixture of stolons, shallow fine roots and deep tap roots enables diverse microbes in the soil.
These diverse pastures have multiple species that all benefit.
Monocultures are the opposite of diversity. They are systems with very few species.
A monoculture pasture includes just one or two plant species.
Optimisation is the driver of monocultures. The most profitable plant is chosen, the rest are deemed to be less beneficial and are excluded.
To successfully optimise something you have to choose just one or two things to optimise. What gets optimised is determined by those in charge. They are the gatekeepers.
The monoculture pasture out performs everything else, so it becomes the adopted practice. But it only wins on the optimised metrics. It loses if you are measuring the number of worms, soil microbes, insect life, birdlife, resilience or environmental impact.
Monocultures win in the short term, while diversity is a long-term strategy.
Businesses and entire industries can develop monocultures too. A monoculture of ideas and a narrow view of what defines success.
No-one goes out to purposely create a monoculture in a business. They kind of just happen. The organisation is always optimising, looking for the most profitable product, or customer, or employees and excluding things that are deemed less valuable. Exclusion just happens.
Token diversity develops. This is diversity that looks good. It’s diversity that fits within comfortable limits that can be tolerated by the gatekeepers. People, thinking and ideas that are within acceptable limits and promoted in the name of diversity. But everybody knows the optimised monoculture exists intact under the surface.
Monocultures are optimised for square holes and if you’re a square peg, then you can do well.
If you’re a round peg you have to act like a square peg to fit in. You have to do things in the optimised, generic way. Monocultures are closed shops only accessible to the acceptable and the approved.
The way to overcome a monoculture industry is to democratise it. This is the act of making something accessible to everyone.
Democratisation is critical for diversity because it allows the people who wouldn’t normally get selected by the gatekeeper to select themselves.
Diversity just happens in a democratised industry.
The printing press democratised the written word. Now knowledge could be shared more easily. Martin Luther used the printing press to spread new ideas and doctrine that caused a reformation.
Digitisation is the ultimate democratiser. It removes gatekeepers. When something is digitised, it drops in cost and becomes available to everybody.
The digitisation of music allowed anybody to share music. It removed the monoculture gatekeepers who made us buy a whole album when we only wanted one song.
The internet is the digital version of the printing press. It’s allowed bloggers to become journalists. Some of the most influential media companies were started by bloggers choosing themselves.
My kids watch a boy called Ryan on YouTube. All Ryan does is play with the latest toys. His parents make US$20 million (NZ$29m) a year from that channel.
The gatekeepers of the monoculture TV industry would never have agreed to Ryan’s show. It doesn’t conform to the optimal way to make a TV show.
Ryan makes US$20m a year because toy companies know he is a better salesman than TV. Online video is digital TV and YouTube democratised it.
Trade Me digitised trust. Now strangers were comfortable buying stuff they hadn’t even seen from each other. It removed the gatekeepers from many industries and anybody could become a retailer.
How can agriculture be democratised? How can agriculture be digitised? Who are the gatekeepers that can be removed? What sorts of diversity can be achieved if agriculture is open to anybody? Who’s going to choose themselves?