What is monoculture? Suggest two reasons why crops are grown in this way?
Monoculture is the growing of a single crop in a large geographic area. Much of the arable land from Texas into Canada is used to grow wheat. Other large area are used to grow corn. One reason for monoculture is the economy of large scale production. It takes less time and energy to seed one type of crop. If a farmer wanted to grow wheat and corn, he’d have to have the equipment modified to plant the seeds (difference in size and depth of seed in the soil), different harvesting equipment, different pesticides, and differences in water and fertilizer requirements. Second reason is productivity of the hybrids used in monoculture. Disadvantage is with genetic uniformity comes large scale susceptibility to disease and pests. In the 1970 a new disease called Southern corn blight devastated the corn crop across the nation causing food prices to increase significantly from bread to meat! Also with uniformity of genetic crops, important genes for wheat, corn or other grains may be lost since i
