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AGRICULTURAL INTENSIFICATION

Benefits of intensive agricultural intercropping

Nature Plants volume 6, pages 604–605 (2020)Cite this article

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The need for increased crop yields has led to growing interest and research in agricultural intensification, which has a myriad of environmental impacts. Intercropping can bring the benefits of intensification within a reasonable footprint.

We need environmentally better ways to achieve high yields. Li and collaborators4 show that a modern version of an ancient agricultural technology, intercropping, has the potential to markedly increase crop yields while reducing their environmental footprint. Traditional intercropping, the practice of growing two or more crops together in an intermingled manner without intensive fertilization, can produce ~15–25% more total food from a piece of cropland than when each crop is grown in monoculture on said piece of land5. However, it has often been assumed that intercropping would have minor yield benefits if intensive agronomic practices were used6.

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Fig. 1: Agricultural intensification, cereal yields and malnourishment as averaged across values for the countries of each economic group.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA

    David Tilman

  2. Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    David Tilman

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  1. David Tilman
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Correspondence to David Tilman.

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Tilman, D. Benefits of intensive agricultural intercropping. Nat. Plants 6, 604–605 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-0677-4

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