VANCOUVER—Large, industrial farms around the world are starting to look more alike, and it’s putting both the environment and food security at risk, new research from the University of Toronto Scarborough has found.

Currently, just four crops — soybeans, wheat, rice and corn — are grown on almost half the world’s agricultural lands, while more than 150 other crops are grown on the rest, according to the study.

This is a concerning trend, said Jane Rabinowicz, a coexecutive director of USC Canada, a non-profit focused on agricultural biodiversity.

“It’s an indicator of vulnerability,” Rabinowicz said, because “the more diversity you have the more protected you are, for example, against a certain pest.”

These four crops, however, tend to be grown as large monocultures, where a single crop covers a large swath of land, often with high levels of chemicals harmful to the environment.

Adam Martin, an ecologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the lead author behind the study recently published in the journal PLOS One, agrees declining diversity is a problem.

“If the world’s farms start to become more homogenous, the expectation is that more parts of the world are going to be susceptible to the same types of pests or disease outbreaks or other environmental fluctuations that might impact those specific crops,” he said.

While the data Martin’s study used doesn’t show how much genetic variety there is within the types of crops planted — different varieties of corn, for example — he said previous research points to issues with a lack of diversity in genetic lineages as well.

There hasn’t been a mass loss of wheat, soybeans, rice or corn yet, Martin said.

But it could have catastrophic impacts if it happens. Those crops represent a major component of the calories consumed by people.

Martin’s study is based on an analysis of more than 50 years of data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, which captured changes in the crops being grown in different regions between 1961 and 2014.

Though crop diversity is declining at a global scale, Martin found it has increased on a regional scale since the early ’60s — largely because more areas in the world started growing the same things.

In North America, for instance, 93 different crops are now grown on large industrial farms compared to 80 different crops in the ’60s, he said.

That finding is more consistent with the trend Ron Bonnett, president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, has seen in Canada over the last few decades.

“If you take Western Canada, for instance, at one time it was predominantly wheat that was growing there. Now there’s a number of different crops,” Bonnett said.

Today, farmers may have a crop of wheat alongside peas, lentils or canola, he said.

Bonnett added that farmers often try to switch up their crops on an annual basis because it helps improve soil quality and keep weeds under control. They’re also quick to adapt when a new crop variety comes out that may be less susceptible to problematic pests or diseases, he said.

But it’s on the smaller farms where most of the crop diversity lives, according to Rabinowicz.

That diversity has benefits for nutrition and the farm environment. Rabinowicz said diverse crops can attract different pollinators, for example.

She added that crop diversity isn’t just something to conserve; it is also created as new plant varieties are developed — work that farmers are actively doing today.

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For a long time there has been a heavy focus on industrial farming, she said, but we are seeing the “cracks in that model.”

“We’ve seen impacts on human health, we’ve seen collapse of pollinator populations, we’ve seen environmental impacts,” she said.

For instance, there have been major concerns about the impact of neonicotinoids, a type of pesticide commonly applied to corn and soybean crops, on pollinators such as honeybees. Agricultural runoff has been cited as a major cause behind blue-green toxic algae in Lake Erie. And a years long research project by scientists in the U.S. has linked pesticides to health problems in the children of farm works, as reported by the New York Times.

Moving forward, Rabinowicz said, she wants to see more diversity, not just in crops but in the models of farming more broadly.

“Diversity is a good thing,” she said, calling it “the foundation of resilience in agriculture.”

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