Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture

A growing, increasingly affluent and urban human population is driving demand for more food grown in more-sustainable ways. This issue features a suite of articles highlighting how intensification of production on existing farmland and with fewer inputs is an aspirational and data-hungry challenge.

This Perspective argues for a global research prioritization framework to advance sustainable intensification, an increase in agricultural yields on existing land and respecting ecosystem integrity, noting research gaps and suggesting priorities.

The global food system must become more sustainable. Digital agriculture — digital and geospatial technologies to monitor, assess and manage soil, climatic and genetic resources — illustrates how to meet this challenge so as to balance the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainable food production.

Energy fuels, and is central to, all physical and biological systems, including the human population and economy. Yet science has missed the significance of civilization’s growing energy consumption. The energetics of the global food system illustrate the counterintuitive aspects of present energy consumption circumstances.

Agriculture has a massive and growing footprint. This study finds that optimizing fertilizer and major crops globally could reduce by 50% needed global cropland, allowing restored vegetation on spared land to sequester carbon.

Conservation agriculture prioritizes soil health and diverse cropping systems. This meta-analysis finds multiple benefits, including for water conservation and profitability, from conservation-agriculture practices in South Asia.

Transgenic rice engineered to increase photosynthetic activity through overproduction of ribulose 1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase–oxygenase (Rubisco) shows increased rice yields, with improved nitrogen-use efficiency, in an experimental paddy field.

Identifying economic and ecological trade-offs of land-use transitions is important to ensure sustainability. Here, Grass et al. find biodiversity-profit trade-offs in tropical land-use transitions in Sumatra, and show that targeted landscape planning is needed to increase land-use efficiency while ensuring socio-ecological sustainability.

The increase in needs for agricultural commodities is projected to outpace the growth of farmland production globally, leading to high pressure on farming systems in the next decades. Here, the authors investigate the future impact of cropland expansion and intensification on agricultural markets and biodiversity, and suggest the need for balancing agricultural production with conservation goals.

There are multiple strategies to fortify crop nutrition and support global food security and sustainable agriculture. Here the authors propose to increase the diversity of crops by devoting more efforts to studying minor crops that are naturally stress resistant.

Millions of Chinese smallholder farmers were persuaded to adopt enhanced management practices, which led to a greater yield, reduced nitrogen fertilizer use and improved environmental performance throughout China.

Ensuring an environmentally friendly overhaul of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy will entail payments for environmental objectives, promoting High Nature Value Farmlands, improved flexibility and policy integration.

Large-scale network analysis of invertebrate communities across >500 arable farms in the United Kingdom reveals that genetic modification for herbicide tolerance has little influence on overall network structure, which is largely shaped by crop type.

The authors predict biodiversity loss under potential future agricultural change. Agricultural expansion threatens species richness and abundance worldwide (up to one-third in some areas), often with little overlap between protected areas and high-risk expansion areas.

The land sharing/sparing debate has stagnated. Finding a way forward requires that we ask new questions and, crucially, focus on human well-being and ecosystem services.

The current distribution of crops around the world neither attains maximum production nor minimum water use, according to a crop water model and yield data. An optimized crop distribution could feed an additional 825 million people and substantially reduce water use.

The authors report on attempts to increase the yield of smallholder farms in China using ten practices recommended by the Science and Technology Backyard for farming maize and wheat at county level.

Sustainable intensification is a concept of growing importance, yet it is in danger of becoming scientifically obsolete because of the diversity of meanings it has acquired. To avoid this, it is important to consider the various scales on which it can aid progress towards feeding human populations while also protecting the environment.

Careful management of nitrogen fertilizer usage is required to ensure world food security while limiting environmental degradation; an analysis of historical nitrogen use efficiency reveals socio-economic factors and technological innovations that have influenced a range of past national trends and that suggest ways to improve global food production and environmental stewardship by 2050.