The role of crop rotation, intercropping and tillage practices for foliar disease management of wheat and barley University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Karlen et al. (1994) have described the shift away from the use of legumes and other crops in rotations after the Second World War, and the increasing reliance on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to lessen the need for management via ‘extended rotations’. Farmers increasingly concentrated on growing a few crop species in a ‘crop monoculture’, sometimes referred to as a fixed cropping system or rotation (Finckh and Wolfe, 1997; Black et al., 1974; Tanaka et al., 2002). Because they are highly simplified, with a small number of crop components, these systems are more vulnerable to abiotic (weather, soil conditions etc.) and biotic (diseases, insects etc.) stresses (Finckh and Wolfe, 1997; Tanaka et al., 2002; Wolfe, 2002).