Published in Scientific Papers. Series B, Horticulture, Vol. LXVI, Issue 1
Written by Dan-Ioan AVASILOAIEI, Mariana CALARA, Mihaela-Carmina BENCHEA, Tina Oana CRISTEA
Intercropping is considered to be a fundamental tool for ensuring agricultural sustainability and productivity, a matter of major importance in the specific context of the last decades and, mainly, the last two years. Within European agriculture, conventional advantages of intercropping system following laborious experiments were disregarded by farmers because of the justified goal of maximizig profits using affordable pesticides on the market. This determines farmers to focus on increasing the size of their farms, replacing manual labor with a mechanized one, resulting a technological specialization of a few crops at the expense of biodiversity. However, nowadays, following the Covid-19 pandemic and the entire chain of effects it generated, agriculture was directly affected due to the limitation of worldwide transport amplitude and the scarcity of products and raw materials that arose, the price for some of them becoming trully prohibitive (to be seen the case of chemical fertilizers at the end of year 2021).
The present paper aims to highligh some paramount matters of using intercropping systems in vegetable crop practice, regarding the perspective of soil, environment, ecosystem biodiversity and economical sustainability.
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