Chapter 2 - Organic Farming Practices: Integrated Culture Versus Monoculture

Abstract

Growing demand for organic food has altered farming practices around the world, including developing and developed countries. After several decades of predominant monoculture commercial farming practices, traditional farming techniques such as integrated crops, crops-livestock, or multilivestock farming are gradually returning. For various organic farming practices, many complexities are involved such as soil fertility/nutrients, diverse soil microbial communities, chemical composition of soil, use of cover crops, and animal manure usage. These features, commonly found in integrated crop-livestock farms (ICLF), can impact food safety of the product through pathogen cross-contamination between animals and crops. Recent reports of pathogen-contaminated products sold in local organic retail, roadside, and farmers’ markets highlight the need for assessment of the ecological patterns of bacterial pathogens, when they occur on ICLFs, and their survival/transfer to crops through either raw or composted manure-based soil amendments by workers, equipment, or other vectors. This chapter focuses on various aspects of organic farming systems in terms of integrated and monoculture practices.