In Which I Think about Farming

I normally don't.  I'm supposed to do some permagardening in my spare time as an example thing, but gardening is a lot of work and I live in an apartment building without a yard (which relieves my guilt about not wanting to garden).  So I really don't think much about farming.  My friend Veronica who sells me onions I know farms because sometimes she is at her farm rather than at the market, and then I'm sad to not see her, but that's about as much as I think about farming.  Recently, however, Bible verses from Leviticus have been all over Facebook as people wait for the ruling from the Supreme Court about marriage.  The typical way this conversation goes is:

1) Someone quotes the verses from Leviticus about the abominability of homosexuality.

2) Someone else quotes some other commandments from Leviticus that are either abominable to follow or just Somewhat Silly.

I saw one of the Somewhat Silly verses linked, and it reads as follows.

¹⁹ Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.

I never really thought about this Biblical monocropping commandment other than that it does indeed seem Somewhat Silly, except now that I have seen subsistence farming, this now seems a terrible horrible no good very bad agrarian practice.  At best, it is an inefficient use of land and at worst renders the agrarian system unsustainable, so for the subsistence farmer this is malnutrition and starvation kind of bad.  Let's take a bad-case and unfortunately all-too-real situation:  a woman is found to be HIV positive and her husband leaves her and takes pretty much everything (because traditional marriage means the husband has all rights and the wife none) but she's lucky enough to be left with a house and a little bit of a yard.  She now has to use that yard to be as self-sufficient as possible.  With good farming techniques and please god the rains aren't late this can work.  The typical arrangement is to grow corn together with beans.    Then she has carbohydrates and protein from a sustainable agricultural plan in which the legumes are fixing nitrogen while the corn depletes it.  If monocropping is dictated she can't efficiently use what little land she has to provide for as many of her needs as possible and she can't intelligently plant different crops together in order to preserve the fertility of the soil.   Even in your not-quite-so-badly-off subsistence farming scenarios, we do have to work off the assumption that land is limited, and having legumes planted together with grasses is way better for the sustainability of the agrarian system.  Corn is the textbook example (literally.  I read about this in elementary school where they taught us that the native Americans always planted corn together with beans and squash and called it the Three Sisters and the pilgrims were totally grateful to learn it right up to the point that they genocided the natives) but even in the Levitical time when the ancient Hebrews were mostly nomadic herders anyway and corn was a generic term for grains because maize crops are an American export, monocropping is still a method that, while it may be good in some or even many situations, subsistence farming isn't really one of them.