AgricultureIsLife or how to facilitate innovation in agriculture through multi-disciplinary research?

Abstract

Over the past decades, human use of environmental resources has largely increased and thereby led to ecological and socio-economic concerns. Damage to land and water ecosystems, resource depletion, and local extinction of formerly common species are well-documented (Vitousek et al., 1997; Dirzo et al., 2003; Storkey et al., 2012). They highlight how unsustainable many human-environmental interactions are over the long term (Stern et al., 1996; Costanza et al., 1997; Costantini et al., 2008). Many of these interactions are linked to the processes by which human populations modify ecosystems to produce food, fiber, and fuel from plants and animals, in other words, agriculture in its largest sense (Tilman et al., 2002; van Grinsven et al., 2015). Therefore, agricultural research certainly has a critical role to play in facing these issues. Intensive agriculture is based on maintaining agro-ecosystems in a uniform, regularly disturbed, and nutrient rich state (van Zanden, 1991; Tilman, 1999). Present-day agricultural practices often consist of raising animals and crops with appropriate genetics, managing soil fertility via chemical fertilizers, and controlling pests and weeds via chemical pesticides (Tilman, 1999). Crop rotation practices and tillage are also used to control diseases and weeds (Curl, 1963; Ball, 1992). The adoption of these agricultural practices has led to major achievements in terms of productivity over the past decades (Conway et al., 1999), which was of great