Fundamentals of Crop Rotation in Agronomic Management

Crop rotation has been used as an effective tool of pest, disease, and weed management since distant past which dates back to the Roman and Greek times. The magnitude of yield improvement and other associated benefits of crop rotation may vary with crops because some crops are quite responsive, while others showed a bit yield improvement. However, the management of these issues from crop rotation disappeared during the twentieth century due to easy access to synthetic inputs. No doubt it is also equally effective in the current scenario to solve problems like stagnant yield, resource depletion, and reduced reliance on synthetic inputs. The write-up of the chapter was based on assessing the benefits of crop rotation and highlighting its significance for successful management of issues related to continuous cropping. The cropping practices remain uniform and invariable if the same crop is grown on a long-term basis. It promotes the pest pressure buildup and reduces the resource-use efficiency. Crop rotation improves farm productivity, but adaptation by growers is limited because small piece of land required independent management which is quite difficult and hinders mechanization. Certain principles have been laid to improve the effectiveness of crop rotation to meet specific objective. The importance of crop rotation was realized again, and now it has become an important agenda among agriculture experts for the management of issues related to present agriculture.