Polyculture

Polyculture providing useful within-field diversity: companion planting of carrots and onions. The onion smell puts off carrot root fly, while the smell of carrots puts off onion fly.

Polyculture is agriculture using multiple crops in the same space, providing crop diversity in imitation of the diversity of natural ecosystems, and avoiding large stands of single crops, or monoculture. This includes multi-cropping, intercropping, companion planting, beneficial weeds, and alley cropping. It is the raising at the same time and place of more than one species of plant or animal. Polyculture is one of the principles of permaculture.

Advantages

Polyculture often requires more labor and it has two main advantages over monoculture.

Polyculture reduces susceptibility to disease. For example, a study in China showed that planting several varieties of rice in the same field increased yields by 89%, largely because of a dramatic (94%) decrease in the incidence of disease, which made pesticides redundant.

Polyculture increases local biodiversity. This is one example of reconciliation ecology, or accommodating biodiversity within human landscapes. This may also form part of a biological pest control program.

Disadvantages

One of the disadvantage for polyculture is that harvesting would be very difficult maintain. Another disadvantage would be that farmers would have to look at each plant and give each plant the special attention it needs to grow within the same plot.

See also

• Agroecology
• Aquaponics
• Beneficial weeds
• Companion planting
• Forest gardening
• Heirloom plant
• Holistic management
• Integrated multi-trophic aquaculture
• Monoculture
• Nurse crop

External links

• Crop rotation and polyculture
• Polycultures in the Brazilian drylands
• Polyculture and disease prevention