See: Martin L. Weitzman, “Economic Profitability Versus Ecological Entropy,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2000.<\/p>\n
“The Risk of Catastrophic Crop Failure,” Economic Intuition, Summer 2001.<\/p>\n
By cultivating a small number of crops over large areas, farmers can dramatically increase profitability. This is why monoculture, cultivation of a single crop over a large area, is increasingly common in agriculture. But despite its short-run advantages, monoculture may also impose a long-term risk of crop failure. Economist Martin Weitzman of Harvard University says the vulnerability of a crop to a pathogen is highest when the amount of the plant in cultivation is small – or when it is very large. The vulnerability of a small crop is obvious, but that of a widespread crop is less so. Weitzman explains why it may in effect be too much of a good thing:<\/p>\n
1. Large, homogeneous crops enable parasites (bacteria, viruses, fungi and insects) to specialize on one specific host, increasing the chance they will mutate into a more pathogenic form.<\/p>\n
2. Farmers tend to choose the same crop cultivated by neighboring farms because of efficiency gains (e.g. in spraying and seed storage); but this makes it easier for a disease to spread – for example, foot and mouth disease spreads more easily where neighboring farms raise the same species.<\/p>\n
3. Weitzmam’s statistical modelling shows that once the size of a crop passes a certain threshold, crop extinction can be very abrupt.<\/p>\n
Diversity makes sense, even if this entails lower yields, as matter of food security.<\/p>\n
[Clipped from: Monoculture and the Risks of Crop Failure<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" See: Martin L. Weitzman, “Economic Profitability Versus Ecological Entropy,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2000. “The Risk of Catastrophic Crop Failure,” Economic Intuition, Summer 2001. By cultivating a small number of crops over large areas, farmers can dramatically increase profitability. This is why monoculture, cultivation of a single crop over a large area, is increasingly […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-notes","category-6-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":215,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions\/215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}