Naturalize all the different tastes, colours and shapes of fruit. We do not need to grade fruits for retail into ones perfect for the eye while wasting good food and giving in to nutrient loss and plant pests and diseases.
We are enabling extinction of flora, fauna and microorganisms by excluding biota diversity with monoculture en masse, causing habitat loss, thereby decreasing the number of natural predators of invasive pests or eradicating them by obliterating their food sources that we often do not even see.
In monoculture rotated fields and permanent crop orchards, pests find plenty of food and reproduce fast and wide without any predators present for miles in the surrounding environment due to the lack of places to build their home.
The Japanese and farmers with experience and knowledge put agroforestry, polyculture, natural farming, mixed cropping and biodiversity patchworks into practice rather than cultivating a single, uniform environment, to create different habitats, improve soil quality and reduce disease, resulting in larger crops and more diverse highly nutritive yields.
Chocolate is consumed across the very whole planet. Theobroma cacao is one of 41 species of the genus Theobroma, where the substantial fruit of the related trees can also be used to make chocolate and butter.
The cocoa tree is a small evergreen understory tree indigenous to the wet tropical biome of the Amazon rainforest, which means it can be cultivated with ease in the hot, rainy areas within 20° latitudes north and south of the Equator, or, grown mixed with wind breaking, shade giving, temperature regulating, atmospheric moisture conserving, large, tall trees, preventing it from being scorched, naked under sunshine.
Adding in a water source, reservoir or pond in any cultivated area further increases humidity, and provides water, nutritive food resources and habitat for carnivorous and omnivorous predators of plant pests.
Mimicking the natural habitat of any and all crops results in much needed biodiversification to reduce our dependence on artificial, short term measures against the never ending race against pests, irrigation water shortage and climatic conditions.
The cacao bean understory tree in its natural habitat with plenty of shade and surrounded in moisture.
Where the plants are, life is, under and above the ground. Remember that trees are biotic pumps and generate rainfall through transpiration and cloud condensation nuclei.
Plant your crop along with native and established plant species that are well adapted to the natural environment.
Similarly, several species and cultivars of the same food crop can be grown together, allowing gene mixing and natural selection, resulting in plants adapted to weather changes and robust against parasites and pathogens.
Different citrus species grown together in close proximity in a mixed orchard is highly feasible. The 300 trees per acre norm will yield a diverse, long season harvest.
Florida’s behemoth of a citrus industry brought HLB onto itself by segregating only the ‘good’ looking oranges, or what they thought people might like the look of, and discarded the ‘odd’ looking fruit, resulting in people getting used to what they think oranges should look like. While, the naturally shaped fruits that we buy from the farmers market are the ones we are actually looking for.
Genetic diversity is the foundation for species adaptation, survival and ecosystem resilience.
Plus, we will all appreciate more colours, shapes and flavours on our dinner table.
Citrus plants like plenty of sunlight but moist soil. Different techniques apply within the same context. If you look closely, by digging a slight hole, you will see that bare soil and a minimal patch of simple wild grass hold differing amounts of water.
Here, herbaceous plants and bushes act as cover crops to maintain soil humidity and provide habitat to plant pest enemies. Perennial plants will just grow again after being run over by the harvester.
Two or several crops can even be reaped from the same amount of land.