What is multiple cropping
Answers
Explanation:
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Multicropping systems are among the most common agricultural methods in the Global South, particularly on small farms where practices are designed to produce subsistence for families with limited resources. These systems often depend on landraces or locally improved cultivars and on contemporary rainfall and nutrients that can be mineralized on site from the soil and from crop residues, as well as from domestic animals that are integral to most systems.
Exploring the historical record and current systems reveals evidence about how diverse systems developed and what successful components and strategies could be used today to inform the design of future systems. It is valuable to catalog the multiple terms that are used to describe a multi-cropping system since these terms are not always standard in the farming systems literature. Critical to the system, efficiency and success are multiple mechanisms for nutrient cycling and efficient water use, as well as pest protection strategies that are operating in biodiverse agroecosystems.
Of vital importance to farmers who practice multi-cropping is resilience in production and income in biodiverse systems. Also valuable to society are the environmental contributions of multi-cropping compared to simplified monoculture systems or those with only two crops in rotation. Small farm families find the labor needs in multi-cropping to be both rewarding in food production and limiting as they attempt to scale up to the commercial activity, and diverse systems address other social issues in the community.
Biodiverse multi-cropping systems provide food for today and will impact broad future issues such as the alleviation of poverty and hunger. They hold lessons from both structure and function that can inform thedesign of larger-scale farming systems that will be important sources of future food supplies. These issues are explored in the following sections.