Why practice monoculture

If monoculture is not ideal, why is it the most common agricultural practice in the world today? All the primary reasons for monocultural farming revolve around maximizing profits. 

If a farmer plants a single crop on the entire farm, there's more space available for that crop, making them a major supplier. Also, they can run the whole business using a single farming system: the same seed, pest control, weed control, and machinery. That helps farmers save considerable amounts of money and effort.

Popular crops grown in monoculture plantations include corn, wheat, rice, sugar cane, soybeans, and oil palm trees. Monoculture crops are usually essential sources of food, fiber, and other commercially important materials. 

Monoculture has helped to increase food and fiber production. The increase in grain production has helped reduce the number of malnourished people even as the population keeps rising.

Effects of monoculture on the environment

Monoculture has immediately noticeable advantages, but it also has adverse effects that are slow but destructive. Such effects include environmental degradation and risks to human health.

Let's consider some consequences of monoculture. 

Lack of biodiversity

Natural ecosystems consist of diverse wildlife communities that effectively sustain one another. Because of that diversity, essential ecosystem services like biological control of pests and diseases, carbon sequestration, pollination, etc., occur.

Monoculture is essentially a threat to biodiversity. Farmers remove all crops except the crop of choice. Consequently, they also force out animal species dependent on those removed plants by extermination, starvation, or lack of habitat.

Many native animal and plant species, some critical to the environment, become extinct because of monoculture. Agricultural expansion already threatens the natural environment, and monocropping makes it even scarier.