There is a ‘joke’ in agroecology: Where is the worst place to grow a grapevine? Drum roll - in a vineyard! The real joke is that practically every grapevine is grown in a vineyard. The same goes for most perennials: they are all grown in monocultures of their own species, and often are just single cultivars. In some cases, this applies to not just individual properties but whole landscapes – think the tens of thousands of hectares of Sauvignon blanc that cover Marlborough.
In agroecology, monocultures are ecologically illiterate, irrational, and unstable. They are a joke. They have to be propped up by external inputs such as pesticides and nutrients to compensate for the missing ecological services from biodiversity
