Conventional farming utilizes tools such pesticides, synthetic chemical fertilizers, and herbicides, with the goal of producing large amounts of food on less land and with less labor. While these powerful mechanisms help to maximize food production and provide food at a lower cost, there are concerns about the long-term environmental consequences of using these techniques. Moreover, there are health concerns with conventional farming since synthetic fertilizers and pesticides can contaminate crops. Alternatively, organic farming is an agriculture system in which biological and mechanical practices are used to address weed and pest control instead of using chemical intervention. A cornerstone of organic production is crop rotation, which is the practice of planting different crops on the same piece of land in a planned sequence. Crop rotation helps to reduce the buildup of soil-borne diseases and imbalances in soil nutrients. The rotation of crops also helps to limit pest life cycles by altering their habitats.

Forrester, Richard J. Crop Rotation Modeling. In Encyclopedia of Optimization, 3rd ed., edited by Panos M. Pardalos and Oleg A. Prokopyev, 4 pp. Cham: Springer, 2023. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-54621-2_835-1

Richard Forrester is a professor of Mathematics and Data Analytics at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Springer's Website. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-54621-2_835-1

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