Wednesday, November 7, 2007 - 2:00 PM
262-7
The Natural Benefits of Crop Rotations and the Costs of Disallowing Them in the 21st Century.
R. Kent Crookston, Plant and Animal Sciences, Brigham Young University, 301 Widtsoe Building, Provo, UT 84602-5250
Benefits from rotating crops have been known for millennia. In the 20th Century there occurred widespread replacement of crop rotations with chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. These rotation substitutes were adopted as low-cost labor-saving benefits to farming. Today however we are faced with the realization that these now-expensive rotation replacements have only been masking or overriding the low-cost or even free benefits that rotations have always provided – benefits that must now be reevaluated in light of updated and projected energy costs, the push for ever more ethanol production (corn monoculture), cracks or openings in the genetic resistance within crops to pests, updated environmental awareness, consumer preferences, etc. The paper attempts to identify some of the natural benefits of crop rotations and to document the 21st Century costs of disallowing them.