Hum…
Monoculture is either the same crop on a field every time, or the same crop is a very large area. A single crop in a field for one season only is crop rotation, something that is absolutely not monoculture.
And it is inherently something bad, that’s how the word is defined, if it’s not extensive enough to be harmful, it doesn’t get that name. It may be “not very bad” and normal, but it’s bad.
I believe there may be a language barrier at play here.
“In agriculture, monoculture is the practice of growing one crop species in a field at a time.”, says the English Wikipedia [1].
German Wikipedia [2], on the other hand, says
Als Monokultur […] werden […] Flächen bezeichnet, auf denen ausschließlich eine einzige Nutzpflanzenart über mehrere Jahre hintereinander angepflanzt wird […] Wenn auf einem Feld in einer Anbauperiode ausschließlich Nutzpflanzen einer Art angepflanzt werden, handelt es sich um eine Reinkultur, nicht um eine Monokultur.
Monoculture are fields on which a single crop is planted for multiple years at a time […] If a field contains a single type of crop in a single growing season, it is called a pure culture, not a monoculture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculture
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonokulturMonoculture is either the same crop on a field every time,
Incorrect. Crop rotation is still monoculture. Dynamic cycling is still monoculture. It only stops being monoculture when you plant and grow more types of crops from the same field at the same time.
In practice, even polyculture fields will be strips the width of whatever harvesting machine will fit, or they’re tiny hand-planted fields.
greaaaat, apparently Monokultur (german for raising the same crop for multiple years) is not the same as Monoculture (english for raising one crop per season) maybe that’s why there is this confusion?
Adding to this: The German word for the English monoculture (i.e., only one crop per field, but changing every growing season) is Reinkultur, or pure culture.
This from the Phytomemeology Facebook page where the mod has some firm views on what they define as monoculture. As far as I’ve researched. Monoculture just means a single species crop, and does not reference a time frame at all. This meme is based off of the comment argument they got into
Monoculture just means a single species crop, and does not reference a time frame at all.
Correct! Crop rotation is monoculture, even if you plant a wheat one year, beans the next and melons he third.
I agree! It also means it can include single species crops that do not get rotated over time. It is an umbrella term that can be used appropriately in both contexts.
Grubbing up hedges sounds like a British euphemism.
I wonder if we’ve reached a critical mass of misconception, to the point where it’s worth changing the definition
D…do you have beef with a farmer or somethin
I hope this was an intentional pun, that’s a good one
It’s just nice to see a meme on here.
What’s genetic monoculture then? Wouldn’t that be identical to just monoculture? Or is it having the same crop, but different genetic variants on the same field for multiple years?
