Humans have long excelled at manipulating their environment to increase the amount of food an ecosystem produces, from burning underbrush to encourage the growth of berries or damming a stream to create a fishpond. The most extreme form of this survival strategy is crop agriculture, where people re-engineer an entire ecosystem to serve the needs of a few edible plants. Over the past century farmers have taken this strategy even further by using chemistry to enhance nutrient acquisition and pest control for our crops.
