Abstract
Feeding nutrition-dense food to future world populations presents agriculture with enormous challenges as estimates indicate that crop production must as much as double. Crop production cannot be increased to meet this challenge simply by increasing land acreage or using past agricultural intensification methods. Food production doubled in the past through substantial use of synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation, all at significant environmental cost. Future production of nutrition-dense food will require next-generation crop production systems with decreased reliance on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide. Here, we present three case studies detailing the development of cover crops and plant-beneficial microbes for sustainable, next-generation small grain, tomato, and oilseed rape production systems. Cover crops imparted weed and pathogen control and decreased soil erosion and loss of soil nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon, while plant-beneficial microbes provided disease control and phosphorus fertility. However, yield in these next-generation crop production systems at best approximated that associated with current production systems. We argue here that to substantially increase agricultural productivity, new crop germplasm needs to be developed with enhanced nutritional content and enhanced tolerance to abiotic and biotic stress. This will require using all available technologies, including intensified genetic engineering tools, in the next-generation cropping systems.
Highlights
Feeding nutrition-dense food to future world populations presents agriculture with enormous challenges as estimates indicate that crop production must as much as double
We will need to increase food production while at the same time decreasing the negative impacts of agriculture on land, water, and climate [2]
The farming systems project (FSP) is a long-term agroecological research project that was established at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland, USA, in 1996 to evaluate the sustainability of the conventional and organic grain cropping systems currently being used in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States
Summary
Crops are currently grown globally using various conventional production systems which use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, and to a lesser extent with organic production systems that use ‘natural’ sources for maintaining soil fertility and pest control. Conventional and organic cropping systems have been compared in numerous studies and have been found to result in different crop yields, impacts on the environment, and levels of sustainability [24]. Some have argued that environmental benefits associated with organic production are diminished as lower crop yields lead to greater deforestation and loss of biodiversity when land is converted to agricultural use to maintain crop production at a certain level [19,25]. Results from one meta-analysis showed that organic farming generally had less negative impacts on the environment per unit land area, but not necessarily with respect to per unit product due to lower yields [25].
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