0 the practice of growing several different crops or keeping several different types of animal on an area of land:
The polyculture consists of a warm-season grass, a cool-season grass, a sunflower and a legume13.
The challenge for agronomists will be to design site-specific polyculture systems and management schemes that work in different soil, climate and crop systems.
Intercropping uses the same principle but grows two or more saleable crops in a polyculture.
Integrated systems could include crop diversity in both time (rotations), and space (polyculture).
Polyculture systems provide greater plant diversity and enhance soil microbial diversity and such systems are able to take advantage of erratic precipitation frequency and distribution during the growing season.
Moreover, since it is based on polyculture it does not involve the financial risk of a monoculture system meaning that a crop failure leads the whole business to fail.
Researchers are investigating farming in polyculture that would eliminate the need for both tillage and pesticides, such as no-dig gardening.
The relay of the economic viability of the settlement was mainly due to agricultural and forestry activities: livestock, chestnut and small polyculture for food.
