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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 three-field system is a regime of crop rotation in which a field is planted with one set of crops one year, a different set in the second year, and left fallow in the third year. A set of crops is rotated from one field to another.
In this simpler form of crop rotation, one field would grow a crop while the other was allowed to lie fallow. The second field would be used to feed livestock and regain lost nutrients through being fertilized by their waste. [15] Every year, the two fields would switch in order to ensure fields did not become nutrient deficient. [15]
Edmund Ruffin III (January 5, 1794 – June 17, 1865) was a wealthy Virginia planter, amateur soil scientist, and political activist best known as an early advocate for secession of the southern slave states from the United States.
Many modern farms are made up of a number of fields, which can be cultivated separately and thus can be used in a crop rotation sequence. 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]