Sustainable Agriculture—Enhancing Environmental Benefits, Food Nutritional Quality and Building Crop Resilience to Abiotic and Biotic Stresses

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.

Plant Nutrient Dynamics in Stressful Environments: Needs Interfere with Burdens

“…The possibilities of using all technologies available today-including genetic engineering tools-are presented in a comprehensive review by Roberts and Mattoo [33]. Sustainable intensification in agriculture to provide adequate food for an ever-growing worldwide population is a key aspect in this paper.…”

“…The authors emphasize the challenge for the scientific community to provide the basis and suitable techniques for breeding programs, taking into account changing environmental conditions (e.g., global change), potentials of changes in cropping systems, as well as biotic stress impacts in the future. Biotechnological approaches must be envisaged to provide cultivars with improved stress tolerance (abiotic and biotic stresses) [33].…”

How Could Sustainable Agriculture Increase Climate Resilience? A Systematic Review

“…The practices and techniques filtered in this review have been studied with different methodologies and different outputs, and all had positive results, which confirms the importance of crop management to improve agricultural systems' sustainability. Acknowledging the benefits that these techniques and practices generate, Roberts and Mattoo [97] have doubted that crop management would produce yields like the current production patters. Other studies, however, have pointed out the importance of these techniques especially in extreme weather conditions [98][99][100][101][102], which is evidence that crop management could in the future under climate conditions, outweigh the current production systems and thus increase resilience.…”

Sustainable Crop Production Systems and Human Nutrition

“…This is particularly challenging given a decline in crop yields and increasing water shortages in many regions of the world (Rosegrant and Cline, 2003). Crop production systems need to be modified to decrease the impact of crop production on the environment and for sustaining heightened levels of food production (Roberts and Mattoo, 2018). Additionally, there is a need to change the way we develop crop cultivars, and to focus on novel crop cultivar development if we are to meet these food production and quality challenges.…”

“…In the past, development of crop production systems focused on maximizing yield through use of irrigation, synthetic fertilizer, and synthetic pesticides (Triplett and Dick, 2008;Reganold and Wachter, 2016;Roberts and Mattoo, 2018). Such strategies increased crop yield but often led to soil erosion, decreased soil fertility, and negative impacts on ground water, lakes, rivers, and coastal ecosystems (Matson et al, 1997;Tilman et al, 2001;Foley et al, 2011).…”