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.