Product Code Database
In agriculture , monocropping is the practice of growing a single crop year after year on the same land. Maize, soybeans, and wheat are three common crops often monocropped. Monocropping is also referred to as continuous cropping, as in "continuous corn." Monocropping allows for farmers to have consistent crops throughout their entire farm. They can plant only the most profitable crop, use the same seed, pest control, machinery, and growing method on their entire farm, which may increase overall farm profitability.
Diversity can be added both in time, as with a crop rotation or sequence, or in space, with a polyculture or intercropping (see table below). Note that the distinction between monoculture and polyculture is not the same as between monocropping and intercropping. The first two describe diversity in space, as does intercropping. Monocropping and crop rotation describe diversity over time. This is frequently a source of confusion, even in scientific journal articles.
The controversies surrounding monocropping are complex, but traditionally the core issues concern the balance between its advantages in increasing short-term food production—especially in Hunger—and its disadvantages with respect to long-term land stewardship and the fostering of local Autarky and ecological sustainability. Advocates of monocropping believe polyculture production would be costly and unable to feed everyone, while critics of monocropping dispute these claims and attribute them to corporate Advocacy group, citing the damage that monocropping causes to societies and the environment. Many farmers practice neither monocropping nor polyculture, but divide their farms into large plots and rotate crops between the plots to get some of the benefits purported of both systems.
Journalist Michael Pollan argues that monocropping not only depletes fertile land, but it results in overproduction of certain agricultural crops. Corn is a primary example, as its overproduction drove its pricing downward. The overproduction for low prices drives many small farms out of business, as many small farms cannot compete with government-subsidized agricultural productions. This ironically, as Pollan argues, leads to "food deserts" in which farmers produce a certain crop that is modified to be inedible and serve another purpose; this, coupled with low government payments, drives farmers and their families into hunger.
Land degradation is also a negative effect of mono-cropping. Crop rotation plays an important role in replenishing soil nutrients, especially atmospheric nitrogen converted to usable forms by nitrogen-fixing bacteria that form a relationship with legumes such as soybeans. Some legumes can also be used as cover crops or planted in fallow fields. In addition, monocropping encourages pesticide resistance and pest evolution and so rotating crops performs an important role in preventing pathogen and pest build-up. There are however a few diseases which are less severe in a monocropping system, like take-all in wheat, as the population of an organism which feeds on the disease causing pathogen grows over repeated years of the presence of the pathogen.
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