As winter sets in over Punjab, one can hear the humdrum of hundreds of machines harvesting rice across lakhs of hectares of paddy fields. In Maharashtra, villages in Vidarbha lug their snowy cotton harvest to the market. Years ago, these landscapes were a sprawling array of forests, grasslands, wetlands and multiple crops cultivated on a shifting basis. But in the last five to six decades, many such natural landscapes have been converted into permanent farms that grow only one or two crops while extensively using resources such as water and chemicals in the form of pesticides and herbicides.

Click here to read the rest of the article.: Friendly neighbours? Study shows crop yield increases when biodiverse environments surround farms | Research Matters