Inherent suboptimality of monocultural crop breeding

Contemporary crop breeding is undertaken mainly in monocultures since the vast amount of agricultural land today is planted in that fashion.Contrarily, a very large number of small and traditional farmers utilize techniques in which different crops are grown in association, intercropping (also known as polycultures).Using standard ecological and evolutionary theory, we note that exclusive use of the monoculture platform in plant breeding leads to an inherent sub-optimality of overall environmental utilization of a cropping system.We come to this conclusion based on the basic ecological theory of competition and the evolution of traits that result in reduced competition from other species.