What is the importance of crop rotation in organic farming?

Crop rotation helps improve soil biodiversity by changing crop residues and rooting patterns. Different crops benefit different species, so a variety of crops will lead to a more diverse and healthier soil microbial community. Similarly, the microbial community is supported by rotating crops with a high proportion of carbon and nitrogen (such as corn) and crops with a low proportion of carbon and nitrogen (such as soy). What is crop rotation? Crop rotation is the technique of planting crops in a different area of the garden so that no crop is planted in the same place two or more years in a row.

While different farms have their own climate and management limitations to deal with, some general rules for rotation are detailed below. As a result, many farmers rotate between grass and legume crops, thus ensuring a sufficient level of nitrogen in the soil. This greater complexity of organic crop rotations is likely to improve the provision of ecosystem services to agroecosystems. Although organic rotations do not show a significantly higher proportion of cereal legumes worldwide (Fig.

We also highlight the differences in organic rotations between Europe and North America, two leading regions in organic production. Organic crops are not what a farming system produces, and neither can organic agriculture feed the world. Regardless of the temporal sequence of crops (within rotations) of the scientific literature on organic versus crop rotation, it is also necessary to cultivate and harvest crops at different times, which helps farmers to distribute their workload evenly and allows them to cultivate more land with the same amount of equipment and labor. It is also important to better understand organic crop rotations in order to estimate the nutrient needs of crops and the provision of ecosystem services that would result from the expansion of organic agriculture.

If an equal rotation was reported, the study was discarded, (ii) complete rotation schemes were reported and (iii) the organic treatment was certified as organic or was in line with the definition of organic agriculture contained in the Basic Standards for Organic Production and Processing of the International Federation of the Organic Agriculture Movement (IFOAM), 55.