Environmental resource management

Physics

Climate change

Psychological resilience

Sociology

Business

Archaeology

Crop rotation

Diversification (marketing strategy)

Agricultural diversification

Resilience (materials science)

Population

Psychotherapist

Agroecosystem

Agronomy

Biology

Agriculture

Crop yield

Demography

Marketing

Psychology

Economics

Geography

Natural resource economics

Ecology

Crop diversity

Sustainability

Environmental science

Agroforestry

Thermodynamics

One Earth

A grand challenge facing humanity is how to produce food for a growing population in the face of a changing climate and environmental degradation. Although empirical evidence remains sparse, management strategies that increase environmental sustainability, such as increasing agroecosystem diversity through crop rotations, may also increase resilience to weather extremes without sacrificing yields. We used multilevel regression analyses of long-term crop yield datasets across a continental precipitation gradient to assess how temporal crop diversification affects maize yields in intensively managed grain systems. More diverse rotations increased maize yields over time and across all growing conditions (28.1% on average), including in favorable conditions (22.6%). Notably, more diverse rotations also showed positive effects on yield under unfavorable conditions, whereby yield losses were reduced by 14.0%–89.9% in drought years. Systems approaches to environmental sustainability and yield resilience, such as crop-rotation diversification, are a central component of risk-reduction strategies and should inform the enablement of policies.

Long-Term Evidence Shows that Crop-Rotation Diversification Increases Agricultural Resilience to Adverse Growing Conditions in North America