Beginning problem: The human population has passed six billion and exhibits "a J-shaped growth curve, and is accelerating" [1]. More people require more food. However "Healthy food needs a healthy eco-system balance within an unpolluted air, water and soil system" [2]. Current industrial agriculture practices, dependent on massive chemical use and intensive land conversion, do not balance output with sustainability.

To feed a growing world, there are two options:
1. Divert more arable land to agriculture.
2. Increase the efficiency of current agricultural land.

Out of earth's 57 million square miles of land, only about 12 million square miles of land are arable1. In other words, there is a limited amount of arable land. Much of this is not currently used for agriculture, but conversion would have considerable cost to the environment as forests, grasslands, and other natural ecosystems would have to be destroyed to make way for agriculture. Affecting natural ecosystems disrupts cycles of nutrients, water, and energy, upon which agriculture itself depends. Therefore, the second option is more viable than the first.

The problem thus becomes: how can the efficiency of current agriculture be increased in a sustainable way?

Since the beginnings of agriculture, farmers have devised new ways of increasing the productivity of the land with better farming practices, equipment, and even engineering the plants themselves. For much of history, humans farmed on small scales with a variety of crops. Because of the small scale, agriculture largely depended on natural cycling of nutrients and energy with the surrounding ecosystems [3]. Although yields were modest, they were stable. However, with the advent of modern technology in farming, namely machines, fertilizers, and pesticides, the past farming practices were replaced by the more efficient modern practices. Unfortunately, the modern farm gains its efficiency and productivity at the cost of stability and environmental sustainability.

Modern agricultural practices favor large, mechanized farms with specialized production and crop monocultures [3]. A monoculture is a large area dominated by single species with a homogenous genotype. The cost to stability largely results from the specialization of farms in vast monocultures. Large farms specialize because each crop requires a different set of machines, so it is more economical to have one set of machines and one type of crop. The workings of a combine could dizzy most people. However, if an insect or infection affects one plant in a monoculture, it can affect the entire monoculture. Only the applications of vast amounts of pesticides over the entire monoculture keep the monoculture stable. Different species give and take different amounts of nutrients. A monoculture, with its single specie, will drain certain nutrients from the soil without the input of nutrients from other species. Massive use of fertilizer has compensated for this with negative impacts on surrounding, particularly aquatic, ecosystems. A natural community has a closed cycle of nutrients while a monoculture has an open, wasteful cycle of nutrients.

The Irish Potato Famine of the mid 1800s is a prime example of the instability of monoculture agriculture. At first, the introduction of the potato to Ireland proved a boon for the peasant farmer. Potatoes are cheap, easy to grow, ideally suited to the climate, and rich in essential nutrients. Potatoes were such an efficient crop that the majority of Irish agriculture was devoted to its cultivation. However, when the fungus phytophthora infestans arrived in Ireland, it decimated the entire crop and millions of people starved [4]. Hence, by example, diversification of crops is essential to the continued productivity of agriculture. However it is difficult to diversify the land due to the high degree of specialty of current farm machinery. With the problems of stability and the secondary effects of maintaining stability in a monoculture, we've decided to focus on solving the problem of turning monoculture into polyculture using robotics. Polyculture will not just stabilize agricultural production but will also increase production. A recent study, published in Science found "Biofuels derived from low-input high-diversity (LIHD) mixtures of native grassland perennials can provide more usable energy, greater greenhouse gas reductions, and less agrichemical pollution per hectare than can corn grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel. High-diversity grasslands had increasingly higher bioenergy yields that were 238% greater than monoculture yields after a decade" [5]. If low maintenance and high yields can be achieved with diversity in the biofuel area of agriculture, why not in the rest of agriculture?