The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) says that to find a response to the increasingly uncertain climate and its effects on farmers, agro-ecologists have turned to crop rotations as a possible solution. 

Researchers have turned to history to understand the benefits of the planting tool better, since the mechanism has been practiced for millennia because it can "rebuild soil health, fight pests and diseases, and spread-out risk of various pests and crop disease."

The USDA also states that "crop rotation also increases the sustainability of agricultural systems and reduces risk from increasingly adverse weather," but the widespread adoption of diverse crop rotations is limited by economic uncertainty, lack of incentives, and inadequate information about long-term outcomes.

ARS Researchers compiled data from 20 long-term experiments spanning up to six decades to compare crop rotation outcomes across North America.

According to their findings, outcomes tended to be better for individual crops when grown in more diverse crop rotations across all growing conditions and complete rotation outcomes depended on which crops were grown in the rotation. 

The release states that "diverse rotations improved outcomes of complete rotations under poor growing conditions," which shows that "diverse rotations can reduce the risk of crop loss in a changing climate."

However, many farmers face steep hurdles to diversify their crop rotations. The mechanism can get expensive since it requires management to be more complex and new equipment, farmers would have to learn how to grow new crops and develop an understanding on how to fit these new plants in their operations. 

To help farmers face these issues, researchers compiled all combined data from 20-long long-term experiments on the impact of crop diversity across multiple regions and production systems on a network system called DRIVES (Diverse Rotations Improve Valuable Ecosystem Services).

DRIVES looks to help manage farmers budgets, by providing estimates of the benefits and costs of managing more diverse rotations. According to the release, in addition to economic performance, "the DRIVES Network will also provide evidence of how diverse rotations can reduce the vulnerability of cropping systems to adverse weather."