Abstract
Diversity of agricultural landscapes is important to maintain the provision of ecosystem services. In face of decreasing support measures for agricultural markets in the European Union, diversified crop portfolios could also offer a possibility to stabilize revenue at farm level (portfolio effect). We hypothesize that (i) diversity of crop portfolios changes along spatial gradients in the study area (Bavaria, Germany), (ii) the composition of portfolios depends on farm parameters, and (iii) more diverse portfolios on arable land provide higher revenue stability. We analysed agricultural census data comprising all farms (N = 105 314) in the study area and identified 26 typical crop portfolios. We show that portfolio composition is related to farm characteristics (whole farm revenue, farm type, farm size) and location. Currently, diversification of crop portfolios fails to promote stability of portfolio revenue in the study area, where policy still indirectly influences market prices of energy crops. We conclude that the portfolio effect as a natural insurance was less important in recent years due to high market prices for specific crops. This low need for natural insurances probably favoured simplified portfolios leading to decreased agricultural diversity.
Highlights
Crop diversity is an important part of agrobiodiversity and is related to ecosystem services provided by agroecosystems [1]
We show that composition of crop portfolios is related to socio-economic farm characteristics and constrained by local soil quality and farm size
Our results suggest that more diverse crop portfolios currently do not promote a higher revenue stability from arable land use in the study area, where policy still indirectly influences market prices of energy crops
Summary
Crop diversity is an important part of agrobiodiversity and is related to ecosystem services provided by agroecosystems [1]. Crop diversity was reported to sustain soil quality, to buffer yield variance against adverse weather events and to substitute fertilizer use while maintaining economic competitiveness [2,3,4]. Crop diversity can increase wildlife habitat quality by reducing the use of agrochemicals [5]. On the other hand, diversifying the portfolio of cultivated crops maintains diversity in space on the farm scale. On both temporal and spatial scales, provisioning, supporting and regulating ecosystem services benefit from diversified farming [4, 5, 8]
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