Monoculture, crop rotation policy, and fire

Monoculture farming pollutes the environment by increasing the use of inputs, accelerating soil erosion, polluting water resources, raising carbon level in the atmosphere, and decreasing biodiversity. Therefore, farmers are advised to implement diversified farming systems such as crop rotation. However, crop rotation, i.e., planting more than one crop in the same field over a given year, may also harm the environment. To combat the environmental problems of monoculture, Turkey announced to implement a new crop rotation policy in 2020. The government said it would not provide support payments if farmers planted the same crop in the same plot for three consecutive years. This paper estimates the impact of this crop rotation policy on monoculture and shows how agricultural fires changed with this policy. We find that Turkey's crop rotation policy significantly decreased monoculture practices. Farmers decreased their cotton acreages and replaced cotton with wheat as the primary and corn as the secondary crop. However, since farmers burn their fields after the primary crop is harvested, the number of fires tripled after the policy. This environmentally friendly policy unexpectedly polluted the environment. Our paper shows how policies may create unintended environmental problems if they do not consider farmers' behavioral constraints.