The Monsanto company does not have a Facebook page. They are well aware that if they did, it would just become a wall of constant protest. There's good reason for the resentment, too: a long, complicated history including everything from poisoning public waterways to manufacturing Agent Orange, bovine growth hormones, and DDT pesticides. They've become the black stain on the biotech industry to anyone with a CSA subscription and a reusable bag.

In fairness, that was the legacy of the "old Monsanto". The company was restarted in 2001 and focuses entirely on agriculture now. But while they may no longer be dumping PCBs in Alabama streams or helping create atomic bombs, a new series of books and documentaries are again pointing angry fingers at the company. Between Monsanto's past liabilities and more recently filed suits against Canadian and American farmers, the folks wearing lab coats in Missouri are regarded as enemies by many in the sustainable farming movement.

In short, I would not want to be head of Monsanto's PR department.

A bit on their history: Monsanto has been around since 1901, when they hit the ground running with saccharin, the sugar-substitute still sold in its famous pink packet. After that initial venture, the company changed direction and focused on agricultural chemicals. By the mid 1940s they had produced 2,4D (the original selective pesticide). Meanwhile, the post-war west was starting to produce food on an industrial scale for the first time.

By the 1960s their cornerstone brand, Roundup, was commercialised throughout America. A decade later they created Roundup Ready soybean seeds, followed by Roundup Ready Canola, Cotton and Corn seeds. By this time (the late 1990s) Monsanto has purchased enough seed companies that watchdog groups were growing sceptical that a monopoly on food production was underway. And while hackles were raised at the number of companies being acquired, it was the intense commercial drive of just a few types of plants that worried most.

But Monsanto has nonetheless been ferociously successful, even throughout the bad press, Whole Foods markets expansion and recent DIY crazes. When Brad Mitchell, director of public affairs for Monsanto, was asked by Organic Lifestyle magazine about the company's horrible reputation, his response was:

"I think more than anything, it's a new age … I think you're holding the Monsanto of the middle part of the 20th century against the standards of today. So, for instance, if you look at PCBs we all know today that what Monsanto did there was wrong. It shouldn't have been done. Did we, Monsanto, or society as a whole know in the 60s or the 50s that that was wrong? I don't think that we were as environmentally sophisticated as we are today."

It's easy to demonise Monsanto, and many do. While I don't agree with much of the company's past, I can't deny they are filling a demand. Western culture expects food to be cheap, abundant and easy to procure. It should be easy to prepare (or prepared for us), ready the moment we pull up to the drive-thru window. Until people start supporting alternatives, I can't imagine their decline.

What concerns me most about any company hocking seeds is the practice of monoculture. To cover thousands of acres with one or two inbred crops – grown with chemical fertilisers and protected with pesticides – is a sketchy tightrope-walk over evolution's fiery maw. When a disease or insect mutates faster than the folks engineering these foodstuffs can whip up a cure-all, there could be a famine to end all famines. When everything is identical, it can all be destroyed just as uniformly if the perfect conditions arrive. If America or England lost all soy or corn production to a single savvy pest it would make 1845 in Ireland look like a cakewalk.

This is precisely why there is a growing interest in diversity of seeds and a resurgence of farmers producing "heirloom" foods. These past traditions are coming back as people become more aware of the systems and politics surrounding the modern food industries.

This type of traditional farming preserves the heirloom fruits, animals and vegetables that have fed us since the beginning of civilisation. Seeds not created in labs, but in gardens. Animals not bred for confined feeding operations, but to forage on hillsides. If blight kills all of your tomatoes, or coccidiosis takes all your chickens, you still have a bounty of squash surrounded by turkey pens. Nature doesn't put all her eggs in one basket, and neither should we.

Diversity in agriculture is insurance. You can experiment in your own backyard by planting a few Brandywine tomatoes or Speckled Trout lettuce heads or, if you don't want to get your hands dirty, support the local and organic farms that aren't scared to raise several types of crops and animals for your table. These are the pioneers cultivating soil through natural means such as compost and crop rotation, keeping the land fertile for our future. It is certainly more labour intensive, but with unemployment hitting unsettling highs, a few more farmhands couldn't hurt society, could it?

So consider a Monday morning breakfast of organic oats instead of whatever is being slapped on a bun outside a car window. We might not stop the antics of Monsanto, but we could start to make a world of difference, one bowl of oatmeal at a time.