Red Barns and Green Fields

Question C) Are farms a part of nature?  Are they more or less "nature" then say a garden?  This question is hard to answer because on one hand you have the visual of a North American farm with it's rows of plants that are plowed and hoed in a way that we control it.  There is no variety in the plants, monoculture to the extreme.  Pollan writes, "Agriculture is, by its very nature, brutally reductive, simplifying nature's incomprehensible complexity to something humanly manageable; it begin, after all, with the simple act of banishing all but a tiny handful of chosen species"(Pollan 185).  The garden and the farm are highly interchangeable and one could say that a garden is just an earlier form of a small scale farm with its rows of just a few plants, but the major difference is the variety in plants seen in a garden.  A garden is usually filled with variety necessary to keep the garden up to par with its natural predators.  Pollan goes and visits some Potato farms in Idaho that use the genetically modified potato plant and see that the soil has this layer of pesticides and it is all unusually lush but has no other life in the ground other than the potato plant.  Pollan then goes and visits an organic potato farmer that don't use  genetically altered potato's but instead uses rotational techniques and diversity in the land to keep natural predators at bay and to keep the land fresh and healthy.