Agricultural Diversification: Practice and Policy

U.S. agriculture currently faces some steep challenges. Climate change and biodiversity loss represent existential threats to the agricultural status quo. As farmland becomes less functional as a result of increasing stresses from drought, floods, pests, and heatwaves, its regulation by diverse organisms becomes ever more important. A reference to diversification is fundamentally a reference to restoring the ecosystem function of farmland by allowing living organisms to reclaim roles that beginning in the mid-20th century  have been assigned largely to synthetic chemicals or machines in conventional farming.

However, as with all social-ecological systems, change in any part of the system necessarily requires or causes change in other parts of the system. Thus, diversification also relates to changing the function of the human elements of the system. That means that not only…