Divergent impacts of crop diversity on caloric and economic yield stability

Bibliographic Data

ID15544277
AuthorsAvery W Driscoll (0000-0003-4053-5256, Colorado State University, corresponding author), Sam J Leuthold (0000-0003-4180-7081, Colorado State University, corresponding author), Eunkyoung Choi (0000-0003-2636-1798, Colorado State University), Samantha M Clark (Colorado State University), Daniel M Cleveland (Colorado State University), Mary Dixon (0000-0001-8102-0203, Colorado State University), Marian Hsieh (0000-0003-1011-2594, Colorado State University), Jan Sitterson (Colorado State University), Nathaniel D Mueller (0000-0003-1857-5104, Colorado State University)
Year2022
Volume17
Issue12
Pages124015-124015
Publication date2022-11-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironmental Research Letters (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1748-9326 • E-ISSN: 1748-9326
PublisherIOP Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1088/1748-9326/aca2be
OpenAlexW4309115953
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited62

Food security and the agricultural economy are both dependent on the temporal stability of crop yields. To this end, increasing crop diversity has been suggested as a means to stabilize agricultural yields amidst an ongoing decrease in cropping system diversity across the world. Although diversity confers stability in many natural ecosystems, in agricultural systems the relationship between crop diversity and yield stability is not yet well resolved across spatial scales. Here, we leveraged crop area, production, and price data from 1981 to 2020 to assess the relationship between crop diversity and the stability of both economic and caloric yields at the state level within the USA. We found that, after controlling for climatic instability and differences in irrigated area, crop diversity was positively associated with economic yield stability but negatively associated with caloric yield stability. Further, we found that crops with a propensity for increasing economic yield stability but reducing caloric yield stability were often found in the most diverse states. We propose that price responses to changes in production for high-value crops underly the positive relationship between diversity and economic yield stability. In contrast, spatial concentration of calorie-dense crops in low-diversity states contributes to the negative relationship between diversity and caloric yield stability. Our results suggest that the relationship between crop diversity and yield stability is not universal, but instead dependent on the spatial scale in question and the stability metric of interest

Agriculture · Agronomy · Biology · Caloric theory · Crop · Crop diversity · Crop yield · Cropping · Diversity (politics · Food security · Stability (learning theory · Yield (engineering · Agricultural Economics and Policy · Agricultural risk and resilience · Climate change impacts on agriculture · Computer Science · Environmental Science · Ecology

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