polyculture
Sign in to savethumb|upright=1.35|Asimina triloba|Pawpaw trees growing under mulberry trees, a [[forest gardening style of polyculture]]
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Encyclopedic overview
30 sectionsContents
- Definitions
- Historical and modern uses
- Americas: the Three Sisters
- Asia: terrestrial and aquatic
- Africa: cowpeas and complex mixed cropping
- Impact of development
- Advantages
- Efficiency
- Improving the soil
- Sustainability
- Weed management
- Pest management
- Disease control
- Human health
- Disadvantages
- Management
- Finding suitable combinations
- Practices
- Annual
- Intercropping
- Cover cropping
- Living mulches
- Mixed cropping
- Perennial
- Agroforestry
- Varieties of annual arable crops
- Rice, fish, and duck systems
- Integrated aquaculture
- See also
- References
thumb|upright=1.35|Asimina triloba|Pawpaw trees growing under mulberry trees, a [[forest gardening style of polyculture]]
In agriculture, polyculture is the practice of growing more than one crop species together in the same place at the same time, in contrast to monoculture, which had become the dominant approach in developed countries by 1950. Traditional examples include the intercropping of the Three Sisters, namely maize, beans, and squashes, by indigenous peoples of Central and North America, the rice-fish systems of Asia, and the complex mixed cropping systems of Nigeria.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “polyculture” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.