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Agricultural monocultures refer to the practice of planting one crop species in a field. [15] Monoculture is widely used in intensive farming and in organic farming.In crop monocultures, each plant in a field has the same standardized planting, maintenance, and harvesting requirements resulting in greater yields and lower costs.
A difficulty with monocropping is that the solution to one problem—whether economic, environmental or political—may result in a cascade of other problems. For example, a well-known concern is pesticides and fertilizers seeping into surrounding soil and groundwater from extensive monocropped acreage in the U.S. and abroad.
Monoculture is the practice of growing a single crop in a given area, where polyculture involves growing multiple crops in an area. Monocropping (or continuous monoculture) is a system in which the same crop is grown in the same area for a number of growing seasons.
An example is the Three Sisters, the inter-planting of corn with pole beans and vining squash or pumpkins. In this system, the beans provide nitrogen; the corn provides support for the beans and a "screen" against squash vine borer; the vining squash provides a weed suppressive canopy and a discouragement for corn-hungry raccoons.
A study for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment concluded that regarding industrial agriculture, there is a "negative relationship between the trend toward increasing farm size and the social conditions in rural communities" on a "statistical level". [67] Agricultural monoculture can entail social and economic risks. [68]
Intensive crop farming is a modern industrialized form of crop farming.Intensive crop farming's methods include innovation in agricultural machinery, farming methods, genetic engineering technology, techniques for achieving economies of scale in production, the creation of new markets for consumption, patent protection of genetic information, and global trade.
The land equivalent ratio is a concept in agriculture that describes the relative land area required under sole cropping (monoculture) to produce the same yield as under intercropping (polyculture). [ 1 ]
In agriculture, resistance through variability is compromised, since genetically uniform seeds are planted under uniform conditions. Monocultural agriculture thus causes low crop diversity, especially when the seeds are mass-produced or when plants (such as grafted fruit trees and banana plants) are cloned.