Natural-speciality crop systems

Natural-Specialty Crop Systems. Forest forming takes advantage of the shade produced hy a forest canopy to produce special, high-value non-timber forest products. In temperate s oforestry, these products include fruits, nuts, and mushrooms as food crops ginseng, catnip, and echinacea as herhal medicines and ferns and flowers for decorative and ornamental uses. Often, these specialty crops are added as products to forests where high-value timber is being produced in order to diversify the economic outputs. 

For the last few decades, the people of the United States and their judicial system have placed a high priority on the protection of the environment. That protection includes special environments such as national forests, wilderness areas, or scenic rivers, and it also extends to such common place natural resources as the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil of our community. No country can allow the lakes and rivers that supply its drinking water to become contaminated with toxic chemicals, the air of its cities to become so unhealthy that its children become sickly, and its soil to become so polluted that crops grown on it cannot be consumed. 

It is hypothesized that it is highly improbable that cross resistance to herbicides of many sites of action could occur in most crops, and that wheat is a special case. This is based on the mode of selectivity in wheat in contrast to the modes of selectivities of other herbicides. Most crop selectivities are based on the ability of the crop to degrade the selective herbicide. For example, maize naturally possesses three different glutathione - -transferases with different herbicide specificities, glycosyl transferases and many oxidases. Different herbicides are degraded by different enzyme systems in maize. 

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