Sustainable agriculture

Whether diets will evolve through social interventions to move closer to sustainable agriculture is being investigated in a growing and promising area of research.

In their Comment in @CommsEarth, Manuel Morales and colleagues argue that we must act now to protect green agricultural policies in the EU to ensure food security in the future.

Indigenous food systems ensure ecological and socio-economic sustainability but remain marginalized in science and policy. We argue that better documentation, deeper understanding, and political recognition of indigenous knowledge can help transform food systems.

Agriculture can be transformed to enhance farmland biodiversity and food systems’ sustainability through agroecological principles tailored to the current interplay between farmland biodiversity and agricultural production on all agricultural land.

Increasing crop functional richness in rotations can support grain yields more than species diversity in many environments, suggest grain yield data from 32 long-term experiments across Europe and North America.

Stakeholders can use an exploratory and interactive model to investigate relationships, synergies, trade-offs, and sensitivities between key variables in the UK food and agriculture system, which can help them design pathways to reach sustainability objectives.

The climate crisis will increase the frequency of extreme weather events. Harrison et al. show that while global waterlogging-induced yield losses increase from 3–11% historically to 10–20% by 2080, adapting sowing periods and adopting waterlogging-tolerant genotypes can negate such yield losses.

National climate strategies focus on enhancing terrestrial carbon sinks and largely fail to quantify residual emissions, according to analyses of 41 of 50 submitted strategies to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Multilateral crop trading that maximizes the system benefit and minimizes the inequality level of water-land benefits could effectively mitigate both nutrient surplus and footprint, according to an integrated evaluation model for China and central Asia.

Resolving ecological-economic trade-offs is a challenge in agriculture. Here, Wurz et al. find that in Malagasy vanilla agroforests, vanilla yield is generally not related to tree, herbaceous plant, bird, amphibian, reptile and ant biodiversity, creating opportunities for conservation outside protected areas.

Responses of agriculture and fisheries to climate change are interlinked, yet rarely studied together. Here, the authors analyse more than 3000 households from 5 tropical countries and forecast mid-century climate change impacts, finding that communities with higher fishery dependence and lower socioeconomic status communities face greater losses.

Optimising the spatial distribution of global croplands could substantially reduce carbon emissions and biodiversity loss associated with rain-fed crop production, according to a mathematical framework applied to environmental impact and crop yield data

Using decision support systems to schedule fungicide application based on disease risk provides similar protection to calendar-based strategies but uses 50% less fungicide, according to a global meta-analysis.

Crop diversification could be important for food security. Here, using methods from network science, the authors find that a positive relationship between crop diversity and nutritional stability globally does not necessarily equate to improving nutritional stability in a given country.

Long-term no-tillage systems enhance cotton yield resilience to climate extremes through improved soil quality in Tennessee, USA, according to a 29-year rain-fed plot-scale cotton experiment.

A proposed optimal nitrogen rate strategy together with analysis of an extensive on-farm dataset shows that meeting national rice production targets in 2030 in China is possible while concurrently reducing nationwide nitrogen consumption.

A meta-analysis of 1,521 field observations from the past two decades led to the identification of 11 key measures to cost-effectively mitigate nitrogen pollution from global croplands.

Compound heat and moisture extremes influence crop yield, threatening food security. This Review outlines the mechanisms, projections and adaptation options for compound extreme–crop yield relationships, highlighting an urgency to better understand the impact of joint stresses.

Modelling reveals large swathes of land in tropical grassy and dry forest biomes that are climatically suitable for commercial plantations of oil palm and would comply with current zero-deforestation commitments, but where conversion to oil palm would, in many locations, cause loss of habitat and biodiversity.

The EU needs an integrated nutrient directive that regulates the agricultural application of nitrogen and phosphorus to prevent ecosystem degradation and support the Farm to Fork initiative. This directive must go beyond the current, inadequate regulations by considering nutrient balances and accounting for regional differences.

This Perspective reviews the practical and conceptual challenges inherent in the development of crop variety mixtures, and considers three domains in which they might be particularly beneficial: pathogen resistance, yield stability and yield enhancement.