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3 Responses to Is the monoculture method of crop production sustainable?

1. If depends on what you mean by sustainable and what you mean by monoculture. If the earth was planted with one crop in every location it could grow in then bad things would happen. If every farmer planted in fields that are 1 meter square with 100 different crops then the farmers are still planting monocultures but bad thing are much less likely to happen and more likely to be sustainable. If your definition of monoculture is one crop per farmer and every farmer farmed 1 acre then that might also not have bad results if there were 100 crops.

   

   JohnB.
   March 31, 2014 at 9:39 am
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2. Monoculture method of crop production is not sustained in present situation.It is not profitable for the farmer.In modern time, diversification of cropping pattern might be sustain for crop production.

   

   Dream
   March 31, 2014 at 10:31 am
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3. Monoculture makes sustainability more difficult to attain, but it is not impossible.

   One reason why sustainable agriculture recommends diversification of activities (such as growing more than one crop or integrating crop with animals) is to reduce the use of external inputs such as fertilizers and agrochemicals by recycling farm wastes and using natural resources.

   Monoculture is an opened system which makes it much more difficult to reduce dependency on external inputs. Polyculture, in contrast, is a more closed system which makes it easier to reuse/recycle farm wastes and for one farm activity support another activity (such as water containing fish wastes is irrigated to the crops as a source of water as well as fertilizer, or grazing sheep helping to reduce dependency on herbicides by grazing on the weeds).

   So, in short, it is harder, but not impossible, for monoculture to be sustainable.

   

   cbsteh
   March 31, 2014 at 10:33 am
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