Agriculture is responsible for supplying food, feed, fibres, and an increasing fraction of fuel and raw chemicals for industry. Fulfilling such demands sustainably is one of the major challenges of our time. In this metadata analysis of 10 years of published research, we offer a quantitative overview of how scientists have been addressing the effects of nanoparticles on plants, and which were the main findings. If one hand, cultivated crops (55%) and plant nutrients (52%) are mostly employed as subjects of the studies, nanoparticle concentration ranges are much above, in general, more than twice that of those supplied by fertilizers or background soil concentration. Likewise, the time span of most studies, median 49 days for plants cultivated in soil, are still short compared to crop life-cycles (90-120 days), furthermore little attention (12% of treatments) has been dispensed to soil microorganisms. It was not possible to establish correlations between effects and experimental parameters such as concentration range, soil pH, or time of exposure, which reveals an intricate relationship between these results and experimental conditions. The small fraction of field experiments (5%) is also challenging to be transposed. Finally, the study raises the question of whether nanoscience will lead to incremental yield gains by replacing current inputs by nanotechnological ones, such as the controlled-release of fertilizers and pesticides, or it will disrupt agriculture by attacking problems so far not practically addressed such as hacking plant stress and defense mechanisms, and modulation of metabolism and photosystems.