Monoculture

Monoculture is the agricultural practice of producing or growing a single crop, plant, or livestock species, variety, or breed in a field or farming system at a time. Polyculture, where more than one crop is grown in the same space at the same time, is the alternative to monoculture. Monoculture is widely used in modern industrial agriculture and its implementation has allowed for increased yields in planting and harvest, but the practice has increasingly come under fire for its environmental effects and for putting the food supply chain at risk.

Continuous monoculture, or monocropping, where the same species is grown year after year, can lead to the quicker buildup of pests and diseases, and then rapid spread where a uniform crop is susceptible to a pathogen. Diversity can be added both in space, as with a polyculture, or time, with a crop rotation or sequence.

Oligoculture has been suggested to describe a crop rotation of just a few crops, as is practiced by several regions of the world.

Monoculture (album)

Monoculture is the debut studio album by American indie rock band Sainthood Reps. It was produced by Mike Sapone and released on August 9, 2011, by Tooth & Nail Records.

Background

In 2010, following the release of a split EP with O'Brother, Sainthood Reps received an e-mail from Tooth & Nail Records expressing interest in signing them, convincing them to put on hold plans for a double EP (four songs from which ended up on the album). After receiving more songs from the band, however, the label expressed concern about signing what was then a mostly instrumental band with few vocals. An agreement was made to include both instrumental and vocal songs on the album, but during the seven months ultimately taken to finalize the contract, the band rented out a practice space to rehearse and write songs in preparation for the eventual recording process. It was during this process, according to guitarist Derrick Sherman, that the group "found [its] sound", ultimately abandoning the instrumental songs so as to have "a more cohesive record".

Monoculture (computer science)

In computer science, a monoculture is a community of computers that all run identical software. All the computer systems in the community thus have the same vulnerabilities, and, like agricultural monocultures, are subject to catastrophic failure in the event of a successful attack.

The concept is significant when discussing computer security and viruses. Clifford Stoll wrote in 1989 after dealing with the Morris worm:

Diversity, then, works against viruses. If all the systems on the Arpanet ran Berkeley Unix, the virus would have disabled all fifty thousand of them. Instead, it infected only a couple thousand. Biological viruses are just as specialized: we can't catch the flu from dogs.

Bureaucrats and managers will forever urge us to standardize on a single type of system: "Let's only use Sun workstations" or "Only buy IBM systems." Yet somehow our communities of computers are a diverse population—with Data General machines sitting next to Digital Vaxes; IBMs connected to Sonys. Like our neighborhoods, electronic communities thrive through diversity.