Pick and Write [Agricultural Word]👉#17

This is my entry for the Pick and Write contest and I picked Crop Rotation.

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If I am asked to explain crop rotation in the most simplest way possible, assuming to a 10 year old, the first statement I would make is that the soil has memory and it remembers. Why do I put it that way?

Grow the same crop in the same place year after year, and the soil will let you know through lower yields, pest infestation and even the spread of disease, because you gave it a permanent home.

This is the consequence of monocropping, which exhausts the soil of specific minerals and literally gives pests and diseases no other options except to grow further. It's empowering for them.

But to explain this in a good way that'll get the full details I'll say crop rotation is a method of ensuring sustainable agriculture through systematic farming. Crops as you may already know demand different amounts of minerals from the soil. When they're rotated systematically, they give each other a conducive environment for growing. For example, the leguminous crops introduce nitrogen into the soil, and the leafy crops use it. Also the deep rooted crops loosen up the soil, making it easy for shallow rooted crops to penetrate it through. You see how they're all helping each other.

So crop rotation denies pests and diseases an opportunity to develop because of the constantly changing environmental conditions.

But it's not a thing you just do and leave it because you think you've found some sort of hack to make farming easy or more productive because this strategy must be monitored and recorded. Knowledge of the history of plant family members is important because the members of the same family usually face similar challenges, which could render your crop rotation practice almost ineffective. It would also be necessary to track the planting patterns of crops in order to avoid repetition within a certain period.

Some of the farmers often resort to fertilizers and pesticides when they're facing low yields. In as much as this might solve the immediate problem, crop rotation gives you a holistic solution by gradually introducing fertility in the soil without introducing any external elements into the system.

_{Posted using SteemX}