Infodoc : Sciences, Techniques et Culture

Food security depends on the ability of staple crops to tolerate new abiotic and biotic pressures. Wheat, barley, and other small grains face substantial yield losses under all climate change scenarios. Intra-plot diversification is an important strategy for smallholder farmers to mitigate losses due to variable environmental conditions. While this commonly involves sowing polycultures of distinct species from different botanical families in the same field or multiple varieties of the same species (varietal mixtures), mixed plantings of multiple species from the same family are less well known. However, the sowing of maslins, or cereal species mixtures, was formerly widespread in Eurasia and Northern Africa and continues to be employed by smallholder farmers in the Caucasus, Greek I[...]

Food security depends on the ability of staple crops to tolerate new abiotic and biotic pressures. Wheat, barley, and other small grains face substantial yield losses under all climate change scenarios. Intra-plot diversification is an important strategy for smallholder farmers to mitigate losses due to variable environmental conditions. While this commonly involves sowing polycultures of distinct species from different botanical families in the same field or multiple varieties of the same species (varietal mixtures), mixed plantings of multiple species from the same family are less well known. However, the sowing of maslins, or cereal species mixtures, was formerly widespread in Eurasia and Northern Africa and continues to be employed by smallholder farmers in the Caucasus, Greek Islands, and the Horn of Africa, where they may represent a risk management strategy for climate variability.