US Green Living .com
The search for more environmentally friendly and more sustainable crops has lead to the search for alternatives to traditional cash crops. Alternative crops usually have less of an impact on the ecosystem and tend to be less susceptible to diseases since they are comprised of plants that have adapted to a particular environment. Alternative crops do have a drawback though:
they tend to have lower yields than traditional ones. Despite this, alternative crops are becoming a more and more popular choice for farmers today.
One problem with traditional crops that make growing alternative crops attractive is their susceptibility to disease. Potatoes are an important source of food, but they are often affected by diseases such as blight. Problems with diseased potatoes can be linked to the great Irish potato famine. Carrots have a low resistance to diseases and pests as well, often suffering from root fly and violet root rot and their seeds are often eaten by slugs. Thousands of years of selective breeding and cultivating these plants have made them weak to environmental risks.
Cultivating alternative crops offers many advantages to farmers. They sometimes offer greater profitability than traditional crops, especially today with people having growing dietary tendencies and an increasing willingness to try new, healthier foodstuffs. Alternative crops may also present a way for farmers to diversify and grow their income base. Alternative crops are usually easier to plant and maintain since they can grow in wild settings without much prep work. They also usually can coexist with other more traditional crops and within forested areas.
Alternative crops come in a number of varieties. They are usually broken into five different groups: cereals and pseudocereals, grain legumes, oilseeds, industrial crops, and fiber crops. Examples of cereals and pseudocereals include pearl millet, blue corn, khorosan, reed canary grass, intermediate wheatgrass, einkorn, quinoa, foxtail, wild rice, spelt, and amaranth. Grain legumes are made up of dry beans, dry peas, and lentils. Meadowfoam, rape, apeacia, jojoba, canola, flax, rapeseed, lesquerella, perilla, sunflower, and camelina are types of oil seeds. Gumwood, euphorbia, vernonia, bladder pod, guayule, fanweed, cuphea, and castor are examples of industrial crops. Fiber crops include milkweed, flax, and kenaf. Certain factors affect each crop’s ability to thrive in a given environment. The type of climate, including the temperature and weather patterns over the year, is crucial in choosing which crop to plant. The type of soil is another important factor as is the presence of different kinds of pests.
Despite all the attractive features of alternative crops, they usually cannot compete with traditional cash crops in sheer numbers produced or in profitability. Traditional crops have an advantage because of being specially bred over thousands of years to be consumed by humans. They require more maintenance including being sprayed with pesticides, being watered regularly and needing fertilizer. For this reason, alternative crops are a more suitable option for small farmers who want to diversify and produce more sustainable crops and who want to fully utilize the limited farmland that they have.
