Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/241/en

the emergence of synthetic herbicides in the 1960s. These are growth substances which, as «Totalherbizide» (total herbicides), intervene systemically in the life-activity of plants in such a way that these either grow themselves to death or die off by other physiological pathways. The use of systemic herbicides — followed by synthetic fungicides and insecticides — transformed overnight the classical diversity of farm organisation. From one year to the next, a family farm could double its growing areas under sugar beet, potatoes, or field vegetables, or — as the market allowed — multiply them manifold. It could specialise at will in only a few or indeed in only a single crop and equip itself accordingly with machinery in a more targeted and cost-effective way. In arable and horticultural farming, the mutually conditioning relationship of the threefoldness of soil cultivation, crop rotation, and manuring dissolved. Monocultures assumed dominion over the arable fields. What had grown over more than a millennium as the Western-Christian cultural heritage — ecologically and socially, in continuous development — the organism of the village communities and the individual farms, disintegrated into specialised individual enterprises whose capital requirements, with regard to purchased inputs, forced ever higher turnovers and hence the industrial mode of production with division of labour and capital formation. (Figure 4).

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