Monoculture

Monoculture is the agricultural practice of producing or growing a single crop,

plant, or livestock species, variety, or breed in a field or farming system at a
time. Polyculture, where more than one crop is grown in the same space at the same time,
is the alternative to monoculture. Monoculture is widely used in both industrial
farming and organic farming and has allowed increased efficiency in planting and harvest
while simultaneously increasing the risk of exposure to diseases or pests.

Continuous monoculture, or monocropping, where the same species is grown year

after year, can lead to the quicker buildup of pests and diseases, and then rapid spread
where a uniform crop is susceptible to a pathogen. Monocultures of African palm
oil, sugar cane, pines, and soybeans can all be particularly aggressive to environment.
The practice has been criticized for its environmental effects and for having possible long
term effects on agriculture and food supplies. Diversity can be added both in time, as
with a crop rotation or sequence, or in space, with a polyculture.

Agriculture

The term is used in agriculture and describes the practice of planting the
same cultivar over an extended area. Examples of monoculture include lawns and most
fields of wheat or corn. The term is also used where a single breed of farm animal is
raised in large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). In the United
States, The Livestock Conservancy was formed to protect nearly 200 endangered
livestock breeds from going extinct, largely due to the increased reliance on just a
handful of highly specialized breeds.
 Diversity of crops in space and time; monocultures and polycultures, and
rotations of both.

Diversity in time

Higher

Low
Dynamic
Cyclic
(non-cyclic)

Monoculture, Continuous Crop rotation

Sequence of
Low one species in monoculture, (rotation of
monocultures
a field monocultures)
monocropping
Diversity
Polyculture,
in space
two or more
Continuous Rotation of Sequence of
Higher species
polyculture polycultures polycultures
intermingled
in a field

Benefits

In crop monocultures, each cultivar has the same standardized planting,

maintenance and harvesting requirements resulting in greater yields and lower costs. For
example, researchers have discovered a native plant to Senegal, called Guiera
senegalensis, grown next to millet increased millet production roughly 900 percent.
When a crop is matched to its well-managed environment, a monoculture can produce
higher yields than a polyculture.[9] In the last 40 years, modern practices such as
monoculture planting and the use of synthesized fertilizers have reduced the amount of
additional land needed to produce food.

Forestry

In forestry, monoculture refers to the planting of one species of

tree.[16] Monoculture plantings provide greater yields[ and more efficient harvesting than
natural stands of trees. Single-species stands of trees are often the natural way trees grow,
but the stands show a diversity in tree sizes, with dead trees mixed with mature and
young trees. In forestry, monoculture stands that are planted and harvested as a unit
provide limited resources for wildlife that depend on dead trees and openings, since all
the trees are the same size; they are most often harvested by clearcutting, which
drastically alters the habitat. The mechanical harvesting of trees can compact soils, which
can adversely affect understory growth. Single-species planting also causes trees to be
more vulnerable when they are infected with a pathogen, or attacked by insects,[18] or
affected by adverse environmental conditions.

Genetic Monocultures

While often referring to the mass production of the same species of crop, it can
also refer to planting of a single cultivar which has same identical genetic makeups to the
plants around them. When all plants in a monoculture are genetically similar, a disease, to
which they have no resistance, can destroy entire populations of crops. As of
2009 the wheat leaf-rust fungus occasioned a great deal of worry internationally, having
already decimated wheat crops in Uganda and Kenya, and having started to make inroads
into Asia as well.[20] Given the very genetically similar strains of much of the world's
wheat crops following the Green Revolution, the impacts of such diseases threaten
agricultural production worldwide.
Historic Examples of Monocultures

Bananas

Until the 1950's, the Gros Michel cultivar of banana represented almost all
bananas consumed in the United States because of their taste, small seeds, and efficiency
to produce. Their small seeds, while more appealing than the large ones in other Asian
cultivars, were not suitable for planting. This meant that all new banana plants had to be
grown from the cut suckers of another plant. As a result of this asexual form of planting,
all bananas grown had identical genetic makeups which gave them no traits for resistance
to Fusarium wilt, a fungal disease that spread quickly throughout the Caribbean where
they were being grown. By the beginning of the 1960's, growers had to switch to growing
the Cavedishbanana, a cultivar grown in a similar way.

Cattle

Many of today's livestock production systems rely on just a handful of highly

specialized breeds. Focusing heavily on a single trait (output) may come at the expense of
other desirable traits - such as fertility, resistance to disease, vigor,
and mothering instincts. In the early 1990s a few Holstein calves were observed to grow
poorly and died in the first 6 months of life. They were all found to be homozygous for a
mutation in the gene that caused Bovine Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency. This mutation
was found at a high frequency in Holstein populations worldwide. (15% among bulls in
the US, 10% in Germany, and 16% in Japan.) Researchers studying the pedigrees of
affected and carrier animals tracked the source of the mutation to a single bull that was
widely used in the industry. Note that in 1990 there were approximately 4 million
Holstein cattle in the US, making the affected population around 600,000 animals.