Agroecological Restoration - Reintegration - Monoculture

Monoculture

In the absence of cover, species face a landscape in which their habitat is greatly fragmented. The isolation of a species to a small habitat that it can’t safely wander from can create a genetic bottleneck, decreasing the resilience of the particular population, and be another factor leading to the decline of the total population of the species. Monoculture, the practice of producing a single crop over a wide area, causes fragmentation. In conventional farming, monoculture, such as with rotations of corn and soybean crops planted in alternating growing seasons, is used so that very high yields can be produced. After the mechanization of farming, monoculture became a standard practice in corn-beans rotation, and had broad implications for the long-term sustainability and biodiversity of farms. Whereas organic fertilizers, had kept the soil’s nutrients fixed to the ecosystem, the introduction of monoculture removed the nutrients and farmers compensated for that loss by using inorganic fertilizers. It is estimated that humans have doubled the rate of nitrogen input into the nitrogen cycle, mostly since 1975. As a result, the biological processes that controlled the way crops used the nutrients changed and the leached nitrogen from farmland soils has become a source of pollution.