News & Comment

By maintaining stress factors under optimal low-dose levels, plant performance and productivity can be increased and postharvest produce quality can be improved. Hence, for a sustainable food production, plant stress should not be feared but systematically monitored and embraced. Numerous chemicals as well as stressors have both favorable and unfavorable consequences for plant performance and health in a dose-dependent manner, and here we discuss implications of these phenomena for the practice of sustainable agriculture.

Climate-smart rice (CSR) is the need of the hour to sustainably increase rice production, but most CSR practices and technologies have not yet taken hold. Here we have outlined the main barriers to CSR adoption, explained the key dimensions, and prioritized suitable CSR production technologies. A viable strategy for CSR production is realized through integrated agronomic management, co-cropping, and breeding rice for climate resilience, high yields, and low methane emissions.

Society is increasingly aware of the connection between the health of the land, of animals and of humans. Visions of ‘foodscapes’ and ‘healthscapes’ are eclipsing the conventional view of landscapes focussed solely on production. Livestock production farming systems must co-evolve with this thinking. Lincoln University has designed and is implementing the Integral Health Dairy Farm (IHDF) to test and communicate these new and transformational systems views. Its objective is to innovate, to demonstrate and to manage a tangible transition from current practices to a system designed to enhance health, from the ground up. This includes measured improvements in soil, plant, animal, human and community health. In this ‘comment’, we focus on applied scientific integration of the ‘One health approach’ into agricultural systems of livestock, presenting our initial design and prototyping processes, as well as how it continues as the project moves from the drawing board to implementation, benefiting from a growing network of supporters and collaborators.

Abnormal weather at harvest time results in wheat lodging and post-harvest sprouting in China’s main wheat-producing areas. Measures such as promoting resistant varieties, using mechanical equipment for harvesting, spraying agents to prevent sprouting, timely storage and drying, screening of already sprouted seeds, timely drainage for farmlands, and full utilization of drying sites can salvage wheat losses. In addition, we have publicly released a spray formula consisting of potassium chloride, abscisic acid, organosilicone, and sodium selenite. This formula is effective and economical for inhibiting wheat germination in high-humidity environments.

Although generally presented otherwise organic agriculture (OA) is much less productive per unit area of land than conventional agriculture (CA) for two reasons. First, because the yields of individual crops grown in OA are generally less than those in CA. Second, because the reliance in OA on organic fertilizer, i.e. plant and animal manures, requires that additional land grown to legumes to provide nitrogen (N) must be included in the calculation of relative productivity. Compared with the commonly used crop-yield ratios of OA/CA productivity of 0.75–0.81, new analyses of the relative food productivity of various crop- and crop-livestock systems presented here report lower values in the range 0.30–0.74 with many less than 0.5. The OA/CA system ratios are higher in less favourable areas and lower in productive areas more suited to crop intensification. The implications for food security and nature conservation place OA at a disadvantage because transformation to OA would require substantial expansion of agricultural land, e.g. an OA/CA ratio of 0.5, would require a doubling of area under OA to maintain equal production. By contrast, higher yields in CA reduce the demand for land in agriculture and consequently can conserve land for nature.