monoculture Hear it!

monoculture Definition

mono·cul·ture (mänō kul′c̸hər, mänə-)

noun

the raising of only one crop or product without using the land for other purposes

Etymology: mono- + culture

monoculture Usage Examples

Preposition: of

  • crop: This means good agriculture land becomes diverted from food crops to large-scale monocultures of cash crops.

Converse of object

  • create: For example half of Scotland's remaining native forests have been replaced with commercial forests, creating a monoculture.
  • form: This is the community associated with high production agricultural grassland and usually forms a short-term monoculture and is of little benefit to wildlife.
  • encourage: A more general concern raised about GM crops is that their wide use will encourage monocultures.

Adjective modifier

  • large-scale: This means good agriculture land becomes diverted from food crops to large-scale monocultures of cash crops.
  • intensive: Most salads today are the product of intensive monoculture with extended cropping seasons.
  • industrial: The EU tariff reforms might perpetuate trade injustice and industrial monocultures that harm workers and the environment.
  • vast: In 1970, for example, a blight spread quickly through America's vast maize monocultures, destroying more than 10 million acres of corn.
  • global: Nor am I advocating global monoculture or an increase in consumption.
  • single: It plants single variety monocultures as a continuum over very extensive areas.

Modifies a noun

  • plantation: Huge monoculture palm oil plantations soon take the place of complex ecosystems that have existed for thousands of years.
  • farming: Intensive monoculture farming of tea gave the soil no time to recover.
  • crop: But once rice became a monoculture cash crop, it crowded the green vegetables out of people's fields and out of their diet.
  • tree: Monoculture tree plantations are anathema to the biodiverse native forest ecosystems of the world.
  • plot: The mixed rice fields were compared with control monoculture plots.

Noun used with modifier

  • consumer: The development of the consumer monoculture Historically, the erosion of cultural integrity was a conscious goal of colonial developers.
  • cotton: The cotton monoculture is more destructive to Central Asia's future than the tons of heroin that regularly transit the region.
  • crop: Experience elsewhere in South America has shown that current pasturage and crop monocultures are unsustainable in this environment.
  • soya: Traditional food crops have been displaced by RR soya monoculture, leaving food insecurity in its wake.
  • species: At the highest level, species monoculture is difficult to change, at least in the short term.