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By Root 2013 0

agribusiness. Because agricultural fields are less diverse than natural ecosystems, they cannot perform all their functions. As a result, farm soils can rapidly become exhausted. In Europe and Asia, farmers try to avoid stressing the soil by rotating crops; they may plant wheat one year, legumes the next, and let the field lie fallow in the year following. But in many places this only works for a while, or it is economically unfeasible not to use the land for a year. Then farmers use artificial fertilizer, which at best is expensive, and at worst may inflict long-term damage on the soil. No one knows how long the system can continue. The milpa, by contrast, has a long record of success. “There are places in Mesoamerica that have been continuously cultivated for four thousand years and are still productive,” Wilkes told me. “The milpa is the only system that permits that kind of long-term use.” Likely the milpa cannot be replicated on an industrial scale. But by studying its essential features, researchers may be able to smooth the rough ecological edges of conventional agriculture. “Mesoamerica still has much to teach us,” Wilkes said.

To Wilkes’s way of thinking, ancient Indian farming methods may be the cure for some of modern agriculture’s ailments. Beginning in the 1950s, scientists developed hybrid strains of wheat, rice, maize, and other crops that were vastly more productive than traditional varieties. The combination of the new crops and the greatly increased use of artificial fertilizer and irrigation led to the well-known Green Revolution. In many ways, the Green Revolution was a tremendous boon; harvests in many poor countries soared so fast that despite burgeoning populations the incidence of hunger fell dramatically. Unfortunately, though, the new hybrids are almost always more vulnerable to disease and insects than older varieties. In addition to being too costly for many small farmers, the fertilizer and irrigation can, if used improperly, damage the soil. Worst, perhaps, in the long run, the exuberant spread of the Green Revolution has pushed many traditional cultivars toward extinction, which in turn reduces the genetic diversity of crops. Wilkes believes that some or all of these difficulties may be resolved by reproducing features of the milpa in a contemporary setting. If this occurs, it will be the second time that the dissemination of Mesoamerican agricultural techniques will have had an enormous cultural impact—the first time being, of course, when they originated.

From today’s vantage it is difficult to imagine the impact maize must have had in southern Mexico at the beginning, but perhaps a comparison will help. “Almost pure stands” of einkorn wheat covered “dozens of square kilometers” in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the Middle East, according to Jack R. Harlan and Daniel Zohary, two agronomists who pored over the area in the 1960s to determine the distribution of wild cereals. “Over many thousands of hectares” in those countries, they wrote in Science, “it would be possible to harvest wild wheat today from natural stands almost as dense as a cultivated wheat field.” In the Middle East, therefore, the impact of agriculture was thus less a matter of raising the productivity of wheat, barley, and other cereals than of extending the range in which they could be grown, by developing varieties that could flourish in climates and soils that daunt the wild plant. By contrast, the Americas had no wild maize, and thus no wild maize harvest. Stands of teosinte have been seen in the wild, but because the “ears” are tiny and constantly shattering they are difficult to harvest. Thus before agriculture the people of Mesoamerica had never experienced what it was like to stand in a field of grain. Grain fields—landscapes of food!—were part of the mental furniture of people in Mesopotamia. They were an astounding novelty in Mesoamerica. Indians not only created a new species, they created a new environment to put it in. Unsurprisingly, the reverberations sounded for centuries.

Maize in the milpa, the