Monocropping is said to be an unecological and unstable practice and is very prone to pest outbreak. Monocropping is a system that there is a single crop planted on the whole field for the purpose of more harvest and lesser work. This system is very popular in many parts of the world mainly for staple food crops and for export products as well as for the industry.

The problem of monocropping is that the field is more likely to experience high disease and pest incidence. This is due to the fact that in monocropping, there is a lot of supply of food favoring growth and reproduction of pests. Since pests are host specific, expect that pest population will increase at a high rate. In effect, the farmer needs to spray lots of pesticides on his field to prevent outbreaks. This practice is very unecological and unstable since pesticides can also kill the beneficial insects in the field.

Increasing diversity in farm therefore can help in decreasing pest population. Understanding some ideas on diversity can help us how to improve diversity in the farm.

Predators are polyphagous and have a very broad habitat requirements. Therefore, if there are more predators in the field, there are more natural agents that can control the pest population. A more diverse system can have more predators and therefore more pest control agents.

Monocropping provides abundant and concentrated resources as well as a homogeneous physical condition. As discussed earlier, monocropping can promote high levels of pest incidence and less predators. You can therefore use different varieties of the crop as this can increase diversity in farm. Since pests are host specific, it is recommended to plant local and adapted varieties of the crop together with hybrid varieties to ensure a stable harvest at the end of the season.

Spacing and Row Orientation can also contribute to diversity in farm. There are crops that are generally planted in 20×20 cm orientation for effective farm implement utilization and maintenance of the field. A more effective orientation of crop row and spacing is doing it in a 40×10 cm manner. This type of orientation results to more microenvironment in the field. It has less shading in the inter rows and is less humid. This results to lower pest population since predators are likely to occur in the field. Studies have also showed that an east-west direction of rows can increase yield by 10-12% and can decrease pest incidence better.

Planting trap crops not only increases diversity but it can also reduce pest attack significantly. Plant crops are planted to attract pests are they are more preferred by pests than the main crop. An example of a trap crop is corn to trap cottonball worms if your main crop is cotton and tomato to trap nematodes attacking pineapples.

Beans wrote this interesting post on :Organic Vegetables-Are They Really Expensive?

It talks about how come organic vegetables are sold at a higher price? This might give you an idea why:

“The high prices of vegetables sold in the market seem to be very alarming especially in an agricultural country like the Philippines. It is an irony to think that Filipinos are buying expensive vegetables in their markets and that imported vegetables are even sold at a lesser price. With the high prices of pesticides and fertilizers, using them on small scale would be more expensive and that is why vegetable products imported are sold at a lower price here in the country is because these vegetables products are cheaper to produce outside the country. What shocked me today is when our professor told us how vegetables are sold at high prices but a Filipino farmer is at the borders of the poverty line.

Organically produced farm products are sold in the market 30-40% higher than the normal selling price of these vegetables. Why? The reason might be the law of supply and demand. There is a great demand for organically produced vegetables but there are only few producers which explains the its high selling market price. For organic farmers who previously employ inorganic practices, they are expected to have a 40% reduce in their farm input. This means that even if a 20% decrease in output may be observed after the transition from inorganic to organic, still, there will be a positive net income. So if this is the scenario, we should be expecting our organic farmers to be wealthy now. Imagine buying organic malunggay (Moringa oleifera) sold at Php60 per kilo, Sweet potato tops sold at Php40 per kilo and so on. The point is that, organically produced vegetables are high value and it should follow that the farmers should be earning a lot from it.

The question now is, why is it that this scenario cannot be seen in the local farmers? Our professor accounted that when they visited a certain part of the Philippines, he was able to interview an organic farmer that plants carrots. The farmer told our professor how his carrot farming proceeds after harvest. He told that he has to walk at least 2hours to his farm in located in an upland area and comes down to from his farm carrying 40 kilos of carrots on his back. This is how his life is. This did not shock me but what made me stop for a while is upon hearing that they are selling their carrots to the middle men at Php5 per kilo. That’s right! they are selling them at Php5 per kilo. Even a one day’s worth of unlimited text is more expensive than the organically produced carrots. Then our professor tracked the carrots and found out that these are being sold at Greenbelt during the “Green Day” when organically produced vegetables are sold in markets. The sad thing is that, those carrots bought at Php5 per kilo as farm gate price are now being sold at Php60 per kilo. And this is very ironic and sad for the part of the farmers. Who gets the benefits? The middle men do.”