Concepts
Monoculture
Also Known As Monocropping
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Growing a single crop, often a single variety, across a large area year after year. Monoculture is what makes mechanized farming efficient and what makes it fragile: one pathogen suited to the crop meets an unbroken feast. The Irish potato famine and the recurring rusts of wheat are its textbook disasters, and managing its risks is much of what rotation, breeding and crop protection exist to do.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Critiqued Here
Growing one crop or variety across a large area is widely documented as reducing agricultural biodiversity and the resilience that comes with it.
Sustainable agriculture literature standardly argues against large-scale monoculture's soil, water and biodiversity costs.
Associated With
Intensive farming and monoculture are named among the article's own agricultural drivers of soil nutrient depletion
Causes
Proximately caused by Phytophthora infestans; dependence on a near-monoculture of a few potato varieties is what made the blight a famine
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