Diversification Of Organic Farming By Implementing Strip Cropping In Vegetable Farming Of The Netherlands

Summary

Organic and conventional vegetable are grown mainly in monoculture fields at most medium and large scale vegetable farms in western Europe. To develop a resilient and profitable system with increased biodiversity levels, research is done on strip cropping systems compared to monoculture systems. Strip cropping is defined as growing two or more plant species in strips that wide enough to allow mechanisation but narrow enough to facilitate ecological processes. In the Netherlands a strip cropping system was designed and examined on a medium sized organic farm. The results from 2018 show that strip cropping offers an opportunity for integrating ecology and agriculture.