Future‐proofing crop production to meet the societies needs

Abstract

Maintaining and ensuring food security is a key challenge for mankind that relies on the key pillars of agricultural productivity, access, utilisation and stability. The pillar of crop productivity relies on farmers to produce sufficient biomass to feed people and livestock, as well as to provide feedstock to support the bio-economy. It is projected that by 2050 the world will need to double agricultural biomass production. Moreover, to be sustainable this will need to be achieved on less land and using less resources, such as water, fertilisers, fungicides and pesticides, than ever before. At the current rates of biomass yield improvement, the world will fall far short of meeting the future productivity demands, and progress could further be hindered by the complexity of climate change and political and socio-economic challenges. Given the multitude of crops and possible genetic changes, combined with multiple current and future environmental, policy and socio-economic challenges, meeting this challenge will require a multifaceted, integrated and holistic approach. This special issue includes reviews and primary research articles that extend and contribute to the understanding necessary for future-proofing crop production to meet societies' needs. The critical review articles included provide novel far-reaching insights and the primary research articles, provide new insights into mechanisms and processes that determine crop productivity. Several of the articles originate from the European Union Horizon 2020 CropBooster-P project (https://www.cropbooster-p.eu/) which sought to identify opportunities and priorities for adapting and boosting crop productivity and to evaluate the most promising approaches to achieve a sustainable future supply of biomass. (Baekelandt, Saltenis, Nacry, et al., 2022) The special issue includes reviews that focus on improving crops and in particular identify and evaluate those biological processes considered to have the greatest potential for increasing crop yield potential and nutritional quality, and ensuring crop resilience (Scharff et al., 2021; Gojon, et al., 2022; Burgess et al., 2022). Another article (Harbinson & Yin, 2022) highlights the importance of using modelling approaches to evaluate the potential utility of changing specific crop traits for both current and future environments. Successfully exploiting new or improved crops will necessitate adjustments to optimise production systems. In this special issue, Jiang et al. (2021) and Xu et al. (2022) describe changes to existing arable system and Thomas et al. (2022) for a livestock system, whilst Jin et al. (2022) examine the alternative potential of vertical farming. Several articles included in the special issue also address a very crucial but often neglected area of the dialogue between different stakeholder groups to identify what society needs, can afford and its willingness to accept both current and future technologies (Will et al., 2022; Nair et al., 2022; Stetkiewicz et al., 2022) One of the articles in the special issue details a potential roadmap for plant research to future-proof crops, focussing on Europe. (Baekelandt, Saltenis, Pribil, et al., 2022). Delivery of such a roadmap will be essential to future-proofing crop production to meet the societies' needs.