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The “Crop Rotation Practice Standard” for the National Organic Program under the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, section §205.205, states that Farmers are required to implement a crop rotation that maintains or builds soil organic matter, works to control pests, manages and conserves nutrients, and protects against erosion.
The Norfolk four-course system is a method of agriculture that involves crop rotation. Unlike earlier methods such as the three-field system, the Norfolk system is marked by an absence of a fallow year. Instead, four different crops are grown in each year of a four-year cycle: wheat, turnips, barley, and clover or ryegrass. [1]
The Old Rotation experiment, which started in 1896, is the third-oldest ongoing field crop experiment in the United States and the oldest continuous cotton experiment in the world. It was the first experiment to show that a cotton/ legume crop rotation would allow soil to support a cotton crop indefinitely.
The Dutch four-field rotation system was popularised by the British agriculturist Charles Townshend in the 18th century. The system (wheat, turnips, barley and clover) opened up a fodder crop and grazing crop allowing livestock to be bred year-round. The use of clover was especially important as the legume roots replenished soil nitrates. [169]
The legume crop needed summer rain to succeed, and so the three-field system was less successful around the Mediterranean. Oats for horse food could also be planted in the spring, which, combined with the adoption of horse collars and horseshoes , led to the replacement of oxen by horses for many farming tasks, with an associated increase in ...
In the 10th century, horseshoes were secured by six nails and weighed around one-quarter of a pound, but throughout the years, the shoes grew larger and by the 14th century, the shoes were being secured with eight nails and weighed nearly half a pound. [14] Crop rotation. Two-field system
Crop rotation has been employed for thousands of years and has been widely found to increase yield and prevent harmful changes to the soil environment that limit productivity in the long term. [3] Although the specific mechanisms regulating that effect are not fully understood, [ 4 ] they are thought to be related to differential effects on ...
The Morrow Plots were begun in 1876 by Professor Manly Miles, [7] who established three half-acre fields with different crop schemes. These were expanded to ten plots in 1879 by George E. Morrow . At first, record keeping was not of the highest caliber, but by the turn of the 20th century it was clear that crop rotation was a useful component ...