User:Stin.joe/sandbox

Joe- Your article MONOCULTURES: A PRODUCT OF EMPIRES AND INDUSTRIALIZATION, should go on the main MONOCULTURES page between the LEAD and LAND USE. You need to find more sources and remove the first few sources on your reference list which refer to your original sugar topic. Your topic is still very broad and in order to successfully address all of the sub-topics, would necessitate much more time and work than is feasible right now. We suggest that you narrow down your topic. For example, maybe focus on just one or two of your time periods (i.e. Columbian Exchange and Industrial Revolution) as opposed to trying to incorporate everything. You will then be able to spend time researching and fleshing out these fewer sections in greater detail. Yuji provided excellent comments. but we disagree that you should expand into globalization and "big ag". That is beyond the scope of this article.

My Sandbox

trust the process _{trust it} Trump. apple is a business like any other big one blah blah tambíen. Ćool ≈symbols≈ The quick brown cow jumped over the lazy cat. BOLD bold

My Assignment: Sugar Trade in the Modern World

I want to investigate and learn more about the Sugar Trade that exploded soon Christopher Columbus "discovered' the new world. Looking into Europe discovering sugar as a hard to find luxury commodity and turning it into a HUGE trade piece that had major influences on the modern world.

Have you looked at the History of Sugar page and seeing what is missing from it? Do you have enough room to comfortably add enough new material? Rgh234 (talk) 00:28, 18 October 2017 (UTC)

 Draft: Monocultures: A Product of Empires and Industrialization.

Overview:

The history of food-ways for human beings has gone through several paradigm shifts. The shift from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies relying on crop yields as their primary source of food was the first major shift. This was the first step in developing the roots of modern society as we know it today. Along this timeline, through trial and error, experimentation, technological advances and experience we have further developed and refined agriculture. The Columbian Exchange changed the entire world and agriculture with it as methods in agriculture production brought a major rise for the worlds economy and population. Agriculture is directly linked to economic progress, it can be looked at as a "parent to industry... nurturing it forward to higher economic development" . This was the case for the Industrial Revolution as agricultural developments provided the resources to fuel the resulting economic boom. The rise in industry across the globe brought major influences into agricultural methods as mechanization brought a new era of large scale production. The scale of agriculture grew to a point that shifted humanity from "subsistence farming to capitalistic modes of food production" . The world population as a result of the Columbian Exchange and the Industrial Revolution grew to an unprecedented amount reaching 1 billion people in 1804. To produce enough, farming methods adopted Monoculture or Monocropping. A Monoculture is the cultivation of a single crop continuously on a given area of land. Monocropping is essentially the same thing, the practice of growing the same crop year after year . Monoculture systems of agriculture are a major influence on global and national economies, governments and societies.

The Columbian Exchange

On his search for another trade route to Asia, Christopher Columbus instead stumbled upon the Caribbean. This "accident" catalyzed a collision of the eastern and western hemispheres that changed the world forever. This connection coincided with a change in the scope of agriculture. The exchange of crops, domesticated animals and pests crossed between the "new" and "old" world. Corn, peppers, pumpkins, potatoes, and other products were among some of the crops that were transported from the old to the new world, while sugarcane, livestock animals, and grains found their way from the new to the old world . Europeans transferred their ideas of production to the "New World" along with intentions to exploit the new found land through their economic systems.European nations occupied territories which later became known as colonies. This displaced the native peoples of the land, being overpowered by more advanced technology and disease. Ultimately, native people were exploited as the manual labor that drove the production of all crops produced in the new new world. When the majority of the natives dies out, Europeans turned to the African Slave Trade. This new economic system that took shape is coined as the Colonial Economy, an export/import economy where goods flowed in-between the old and new worlds . The The warmer climate of the western hemisphere gave Europe access to crops and materials that could not grow in abundance domestically . Economic emphasis on products such as sugar, coffee and tobacco brought rise to Plantation System, where private farmers grew these labor intensive crops on individually owned Plantations . These products were grown in the new world and then shipped back to the motherland. The rise of plantations "destroyed rich and new world ecosystems, such as rainforests and wetlands, installing in their place monocultures" . Crops such as sugar cane, cacao, coffee and tobacco became large trade commodities due to incredibly high demand, growers prioritized these plants on their plantations and monocultural production ensued on a large scale. For example, the island of Antigua was a British colony that became subject to "three centuries of continuous, intensive sugarcane monoculture", sugarcane monoculture was present "on many of the islands of the Caribbean". This was the case not just for sugarcane, as "colonialism introduced exclusive dependence on monocultures of cash crops for exports". Growers controlled economies of scale by controlling labor and creating surplus through the higher yields they were now able to produce . The seeds of the modern were planted in the columbian exchange as it gave rise to the next paradigm shift of society.

Industrial Revolution and Agriculture

By the 18th century European society was flourishing economically as a result of the Columbian Exchange, population reached upwards of 150 million by 1800 compared to 60 million around 1492. Economic prowess and population growth coincided with huge demand for products. Producers needed more cost effective means of production, and human innovation gave way to the inventions that mechanized the factory system and gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. This time period had a ripple effect, where new technological, financial and transportation methods exponentially grew food production into a "more specialized and commoditized system of agriculture" . The new steam engine gave way to railroads which revolutionized transportation of goods, generating more access across landscapes for products to be bought and sold. Agriculture both impacted and was impacted by the pace and pattern of economic growth seen during the Industrial Revolution. In order to drive industry production, the supply of food and raw materials needed to sufficiently meet the demand. Another shift in agriculture and rise in food supply was provided through agricultural innovation that led farmers away from traditional cultivation methods to larger scale, more consolidated farming thanks to a revolutionary discovery of the benefits of crop rotation systems . This system optimized farm land by rotating a primary crop, a fodder crop, and a grazing crop on farm land. Crop rotations vastly decreased the amount of time land had to be left fallow leaving more acreage to be planted. Grazing crops increased the capacity to carry livestock populations on farms, increasing natural fertilizer supply as well as meat and dairy production. This increased the fertility of soil, with the addition of the plow, land that was originally considered infertile became usable increasing the acreage farmers could use one again. The ratio of cropped to cultivated land, the yield per acre and capacity of land to carry animals all increased tremendously. Society underwent a large vocational shift, instead of an "agrarian lifestyle" of farming, people moved into urban areas to work in factories. This shift "led to the displacement of food production at the individual, local, and community level" and the farms that did survive grew tremendously in scale. It was not just on plantations that monocultures appeared, the Industrial Revolution made it "easy to fall into the mindset of monoculture". At this time in Ireland to feed its growing population farmers adopted the potato. Specifically, a single variety of potato called the "Lumper" all resulting potatoes grown in Ireland were clones of each other. This large scale potato monoculture did sufficiently feed the population until disease set in. The lack of genetic variation basically resulted in a wipeout of the food supply unfortunately leading to the Irish Potato Famine. The Industrial Revolution overall resulted in production on a larger than ever scale. Agriculture being the "bottleneck to industrial progress" profited as well growing tremendously in size proportionally with industry.

Peer Review (Yuji Cusick):

Right now, you have a lot of great information, but you're writing this as if its an all-encompassing historical dialogue of agriculture. You don't need to provide the background of Columbus and the agricultural revolution because you're not building up to the advent of monocropping from a historical perspective. I think wikipedia articles are supposed to address the topic at hand and don't necessarily go in-depth to the surrounding context. I think you can mention how the domestication of crops was born out of the Columbian Exchange and how the industrial revolution paved the way for a greater demand for food production, but a lot of the background information can be given using hyperlinks. I think you have more potential in the "Globalization and Monocultures" and "Big Agriculture and Monocultures" sections because then you can talk about its use in addressing food security, the potential pitfalls, where it's being implemented, how staple crops fit in our current diet, etc. I think Dr. Berg would be interested to know more about the controversy surrounding monocropping, because there are groups that oppose large corporations like Monsanto who patent and sell identical crops to farmers, which leads to a decrease in biodiversity. Are there alternatives to monocropping? Good start, but I think you may have done too much and put in too much about the history of agriculture before monocropping; I think you should start at monocropping and look forward.

Peer Review (Enara Roy):

I left comments on your draft in bold font and parenthesis. So far, the article is really good and definitely has a lot of great sources and useful information. I think in order to improve your article, you should add more hyperlinks (which I already started to do for you), so that it can resemble a wiki article more. As for the topic itself, it might help if you narrow your topic down a bit more. Sugar trade in the modern world is pretty broad, and maybe if you choose a certain time period such as post-columbian exchange or during the industrial revolution it would help narrow your focus.