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Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming

Cropland use activities are major drivers of global environmental changes and of farming system resilience. Rotating crops is a critical land-use driver, and a farmers’ key strategy to control environmental stresses and crop performances. Evidence has accumulated that crop rotations have been dramat...

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Autores principales: Barbieri, Pietro, Pellerin, Sylvain, Nesme, Thomas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5653822/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29062017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-14271-6
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author Barbieri, Pietro
Pellerin, Sylvain
Nesme, Thomas
author_facet Barbieri, Pietro
Pellerin, Sylvain
Nesme, Thomas
author_sort Barbieri, Pietro
collection PubMed
description Cropland use activities are major drivers of global environmental changes and of farming system resilience. Rotating crops is a critical land-use driver, and a farmers’ key strategy to control environmental stresses and crop performances. Evidence has accumulated that crop rotations have been dramatically simplified over the last 50 years. In contrast, organic farming stands as an alternative production way that promotes crop diversification. However, our understanding of crop rotations is surprisingly limited. In order to understand if organic farming would result in more diversified and multifunctional landscapes, we provide here a novel, systematic comparison of organic-to-conventional crop rotations at the global scale based on a meta-analysis of the scientific literature, paired with an independent analysis of organic-to-conventional land-use. We show that organic farming leads to differences in land-use compared to conventional: overall, crop rotations are 15% longer and result in higher diversity and evener crop species distribution. These changes are driven by a higher abundance of temporary fodders, catch and cover-crops, mostly to the detriment of cereals. We also highlighted differences in organic rotations between Europe and North-America, two leading regions for organic production. This increased complexity of organic crop rotations is likely to enhance ecosystem service provisioning to agroecosystems.
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spelling pubmed-56538222017-11-08 Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming Barbieri, Pietro Pellerin, Sylvain Nesme, Thomas Sci Rep Article Cropland use activities are major drivers of global environmental changes and of farming system resilience. Rotating crops is a critical land-use driver, and a farmers’ key strategy to control environmental stresses and crop performances. Evidence has accumulated that crop rotations have been dramatically simplified over the last 50 years. In contrast, organic farming stands as an alternative production way that promotes crop diversification. However, our understanding of crop rotations is surprisingly limited. In order to understand if organic farming would result in more diversified and multifunctional landscapes, we provide here a novel, systematic comparison of organic-to-conventional crop rotations at the global scale based on a meta-analysis of the scientific literature, paired with an independent analysis of organic-to-conventional land-use. We show that organic farming leads to differences in land-use compared to conventional: overall, crop rotations are 15% longer and result in higher diversity and evener crop species distribution. These changes are driven by a higher abundance of temporary fodders, catch and cover-crops, mostly to the detriment of cereals. We also highlighted differences in organic rotations between Europe and North-America, two leading regions for organic production. This increased complexity of organic crop rotations is likely to enhance ecosystem service provisioning to agroecosystems. Nature Publishing Group UK 2017-10-23 /pmc/articles/PMC5653822/ /pubmed/29062017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-14271-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Barbieri, Pietro
Pellerin, Sylvain
Nesme, Thomas
Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming
title Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming
title_full Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming
title_fullStr Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming
title_full_unstemmed Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming
title_short Comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming
title_sort comparing crop rotations between organic and conventional farming
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5653822/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29062017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-14271-6
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