Crop Rotation

Historical Background

Dating back to some of the earliest eras of organized cultivation, crop rotation is a traditional farming technique that has been used at one time or another in many different parts of the world. Detailed records show that the technique was used to improve agricultural production in China during the Han Dynasty from the 3rd century B.C.E. to the 3rd century [Page 114]C.E. In the Near East, crop rotation was scientifically developed during the Islamic Golden Age, as crop rotation techniques were combined with advances in irrigation technology. A three-year crop rotation pattern was followed in Europe during the Middle Ages, in which a wheat crop was followed by a year of oats or barley, broken by a year-long period in which the field lay fallow; that is, unplanted. The technique was developed further in Britain with the four-field crop rotation pattern, in which a different crop was planted in three of the four fields, with the fourth allowed to lay fallow, rotating each year. Poly-cultural farming practices were used by indigenous peoples in the Americas before European colonization. Settlers adapted European agricultural practices to the North American environment, borrowing indigenous crops and techniques. The benefits of crop rotation, and the consequences of failing to rotate crops, were so well understood that by the 19th century, it was common for leases on agricultural land in the United States to include a stipulation in which the tenant agreed to rotate crops annually. The traditional corn-oats-clover crop rotation was routinely practiced in U.S. agriculture until the late 1950s, when it was phased out with the advent of new developments in mechanized farming. Inorganic fertilizer production and the breeding of high-yield crop varieties, as well as other economic factors, further contributed to this trend. By the mid-1970s, monocropping had almost completely replaced crop rotation as the dominant agricultural practice in the United States.

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