Abstract
There is no shortage of data demonstrating that diversified cropping systems can sustain high levels of productivity with fewer external inputs and lower externalities compared to more simplified systems. Similarly, data exist indicating diverse cropping systems have greater capacity to buffer against and adapt to weather extremes associated with climate change. Yet, agriculture in the US Corn Belt and other major crop production regions around the world continues to move toward simplified rotations grown over increasingly large acreages. If our goal is to see more of the agricultural landscape made up of diverse agricultural systems and the ecosystem services they provide, it is critical we understand and creatively address the factors that both give rise to monocultures and reinforce their entrenchment at the exclusion of more diversified alternatives. Using the current state of farming and agriculture policy in the US as a case study, we argue that a pernicious feedback exists in which economic and policy forces incentivize low diversity cropping systems which then become entrenched due, in part, to a lack of research and policy aimed at enabling farming practices that support the diversification of cropping systems at larger spatial scales. We use the recent example of dicamba-resistant crops to illustrate the nature of this pernicious feedback and offer suggestions for creating “virtuous feedbacks” aimed at achieving a more diversified agriculture.
Highlights
Farmers have known for millennia that planting the same crop in the same field year after year quickly leads to impoverished soil and unmanageable populations of disease organisms, weeds, and insect pests (Bullock, 1992; Howieson et al, 2000; Karlen et al, 2006)
The agroecology literature is replete with papers expounding the benefits of cropping system diversification and the necessary role that crop diversity plays in facilitating a more sustainable system of agriculture (e.g., Altieri, 1999; Lin, 2011; Bommarco et al, 2013; and many more), including broad brush calls for “agroecological transformation of monocultures” as “a strategy that represents a robust path to increasing the productivity, sustainability, and resilience of agricultural production” (Altieri et al, 2015)
We have outlined several strategies, aimed primarily at agricultural scientists and their research funders, for addressing these issues, including expanding the agroecology research agenda to include large-scale farming systems and the search for scalable practices that can be integrated into large farms, as well as encouraging agricultural scientists to take a more participatory approach to policy and rule-setting; many other strategies likely exist
Summary
Farmers have known for millennia that planting the same crop in the same field year after year quickly leads to impoverished soil and unmanageable populations of disease organisms, weeds, and insect pests (Bullock, 1992; Howieson et al, 2000; Karlen et al, 2006). These factors tend to be byproducts of the enablers of cropping system simplification, the crop protection products that are relied upon to control weeds and insect pests in simplified cropping systems These types of reinforcing factors are problematic because they have the potential to reduce landscape-scale crop diversity either by threatening the coexistence of certain crops or cropping systems or by forcing farmers to further simplify their cropping systems as a defensive counter-measure. We contend that the dicamba-resistant cropping system example highlights a central crux of the cropping system diversity problem (Figure 3) In this case, private sector interests (i.e., the biotech seed and agrichemical industry) profit from the FIGURE 2 | Change in crop diversity across a hypothetical agricultural landscape over 5 years following the introduction of a reinforcing factor that drives defensive simplification of neighboring cropping systems. Our final section outlines a possible roadmap for achieving such actions
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