In a 6-Year Trial, Diverse Cropping Was a Triple-Win: Less Emissions, More Income, More Yields
Rotating crops with a diverse array of plants could increase yields by almost 40%, lock away almost 10% more carbon into the soil, and lower net greenhouse gas emissions by over 90%.
These striking findings come from an ambitious six-year field experiment on the North China Plain, a region that contains 70% of the country’s arable land and produces 23% of its cereal. It’s one of the most intensively-cultivated places in the world—and so is the perfect landscape to test whether changes to conventional farming practices could have a positive real-world impact.
The researchers’ goal was to shake up the standard winter-wheat-to-summer-maize crop rotation by adding a few more crops into the mix—and then to see whether this arrangement benefited farmers’ bottom lines, and the environment.