Roots of monocultured soybean plant (Glycine Max) - absent of mycorrhizal association.
If you’re from Western New York, you’re likely familiar with I-90, the highway that connects most of the region’s major cities. While most of this drive consists of forests or small highway towns, there is one stretch, in between Rochester and Syracuse, where the land’s ecology suddenly changes. Suddenly, forests disappear, and you become surrounded by wetlands and lakes. This is Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, a 10,000 acre wildlife preserve.
After driving past enough times, I had decided to finally visit. While I was hoping to find some cool fungi, see some herons, and maybe forage some plants, I instead ended up coming home with some water and soil samples, and also a big reality check. Driving up a hill to the parking lot of my trailhead, I wasn’t greeted with wild flora or fauna, but instead soy monoculture as far as the eye could see. Massive fields of depleted, sad soil, in the middle of a “wildlife preserve”.
Instead of spending the day birdwatching, I took a long time really looking at these soy plants, and how alien the cultivars we have bred seem when you really look at them. Only to be processed into carcinogenic oils, abstracted from their plant forms, it makes you wonder if these plants even feel alive. Their roots aren’t embraced or held in by fungi or bacteria in the soil, rather, they take the soil hostage, holding it tight as if it were trying to escape from the grasp of the soy plants’ roots. And indeed, when I lifted one of these plants from the soil, the roots came out clean, almost as if they were never really grown in the earth at all. The earth was waiting for something to remove and reject them. The soil was pure dust. Eroding, anaerobic waste of what had once been fertile old growth forest. There is no food-web within this soil. Only a few bacteria taking what they can in the linear chain of fertilization and nitrogen fixation that is the entire premise of corn and soy rotation in “conventional agriculture”. The corn crops were nearly ready to be harvested. Many of the cobs were covered in molds that would eventually be processed into both human and animal feed laden with aflatoxin, and never properly processed/nixtamalized. These crops and farming practices are killing or soils, and they are killing and hurting you and your loved ones whenever you consume food from the grocery store.
I didn’t let this day get me down. I actually found it very inspiring to see such a ridiculous thing— a monoculture within a wildlife preserve. These systems are so fragile that it made me realize that they will undeniably collapse in the very near future. I would already consider the prevalence of disease in soy monocultures a sign of imminent collapse. We cannot breed resistive varieties faster than fungi can adapt. And even if we could, why would we? The soy oil produced from these plants is horrible for our health.
I took a sample of some anaerobic smelling pond water hoping to see some microbes. I saw some bacteria, and maybe a few other signs of life, but what caught my eye were the tiny blue, red, and clear immobile objects under the slide. Microplastics. It was very shocking at first to realize the amount of plastic in a random sample of pond water, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been.
I went to this nature preserve expecting nature to be thriving and abundant, only to witness another cry for help, another wake up call to the urgency of climate change. If you live in the area, I would actually encourage you to visit the preserve to see how radical we must become with our approach to fighting climate change.
The specific trailhead I used is at these coordinates:
43.078560, -76.690495
Corn (Zea Mays), struggling to find friends in barren soil
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