Sustainable Intensification Of Crop Production

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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 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.

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.

It is a moral imperative to ensure that enough food of adequate quality is produced for humankind, that all humans have access to the food of their preference in a fair manner, that production is taking place without eroding the natural resource base, and that access to natural resources is fairly distributed over the current world population and guaranteed for future generations. Fraser et al. (2016) identified four perspectives in the debate on global food security, and from these perspectives, they proposed four types of key strategies: (i) technological strategies to increase production, (ii) socio-economic strategies to achieve equitable food distribution, (iii) strategies to promote local food movements, and (iv) economic, political, and regulatory changes to correct current market and food system imperfections and failures. In our view, these strategies are all needed simultaneously and in a coherent and orchestrated way to realize global food security in a sustainable manner.

In agriculture, producing more per unit of input (or maintaining production with less input) is called agricultural intensification (FAO 2004). However, there is a problem with such a general, technical definition. An increase in input of mineral fertilizer will increase the production per hectare and thereby intensify agricultural production as it will increase the production per unit of land and probably per unit of labor as well; at the same time, it will reduce the production per unit of fertilizer or per unit of cash, if other inputs are not increased (or at least optimized) at the same time, based on the Law of Diminishing Returns (Keating et al. 2010). This has a clear practical implication: the process of intensification does not improve the efficiency of all inputs at the same time and trade-offs have to be considered when intensifying.

Nowadays, we have the technology and knowledge to create a richer shade of green in agricultural production. Weekley et al. (2012) described how a sustainable agriculture can be designed through the creation of so-called smart field technology platforms by combining environmental sensors (partly mounted to drones or through satellite vision), digital imaging, and data analysis, allowing subsurface precision soil management (including the soil meso- and microbiota) and plant-input delivery, based on real-time monitoring of soil, crop, and environment status.

Sustainability issues (and especially sustainable intensification) qualify as so-called wicked problems (Rittel and Webber 1973), i.e. problems that are poorly defined or even resist conventional definition and cannot be solved by science but can only be resolved through interactions with multiple stakeholders with conflicting perspectives.

Agricultural sustainability encompasses three dimensions, viz., environmental, social, and economic sustainability, but the debate on agricultural sustainability privileges either the environmental dimension (low environmental foot print) or the economic dimension (when pleas for sustainable intensification imply a business-as-usual scenario), whereas the social dimension (food security; human well-being) is often neglected.

The often vague or imprecise definitions of intensification are part of the problem in the debate on sustainable intensification. Intensification is defined as increasing agricultural production per unit of input; often, but not necessarily so, this increase is per unit of land. Inputs are, however, much more diverse and can be part of the ecological resource base (e.g. land, water, nutrients), man-made (e.g. mineral fertilizer, crop protectants), or socio-economic (e.g. knowledge, labor). Intensification requires proper management and use of all inputs, certainly when they are expensive (cost reduction), are available in limited amounts (e.g. phosphorus, fresh water), are difficult to obtain (e.g. crop protectants in some developing countries), or behave in a complex manner in the agroecosystem (e.g. nitrogen). Proper management also includes avoidance and management of risks, for example, the risk of reduction in water quality by rapidly changing inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer (Bouwman et al. 2017). In many agricultural situations, intensification is actually associated with increases in inputs, not with reductions, in order to produce more per unit of the same or other inputs. The science and practice of optimum management of internal and external resources is central in agronomy and farming, respectively.

Some forms of intensification, e.g. the increase of agricultural production per unit of land and per unit of labor, can only be achieved by increasing other inputs. With agriculture becoming less attractive as an occupation (and the younger generation increasingly moving to urban centers), yield increases per unit labor through external inputs are equally imperative. In many parts of the world, this intensification by increasing external inputs is a feasible and productive option, either because the current levels of other kinds of inputs (e.g. seed, knowledge) are already so high that the external inputs will be used efficiently or, in contrast, because the base level of the external inputs is so low and the availability of other resources (land and/or labor) is reasonably high that one can profit from the strong response to input level in the lower range of input availability. In other parts of the world, the Law of Diminishing Returns of inputs takes its toll in terms of decreased resource use efficiency.

Yet, current agronomy tends to reduce the concept of resource use efficiency to one privileged dimension, the agronomic efficiency, thereby recommending one specific pathway of (sustainable) intensification. Because of this privileged dimension of agronomic efficiency, current agronomy is contested (Sumberg et al. 2013b). Moreover, it is important to realize that farmers, as primary producers, are only the first link in a value chain of agricultural production and that the efficiency of the use of resources can also be applied to the entire value chain, from field to fork. Van Bueren et al. (2014) clearly indicated how complicated and specialized a value chain of agricultural products can become. They used the example of chicken meat production by rearing broilers. Chicken meat production systems have, compared with many other animal meat production systems, a low carbon footprint. However, the broiler meat value chain has at least 40 different specialized links that behave as a network of many separate subsystems (Van Bueren et al. 2014). Different links in the value chain primarily interact with actors immediately upstream or downstream the value chain, and the main driver is economic efficiency, at the expense of other forms of efficiency. Since these actors do not have influence on what is happening farther upstream or downstream, the value chain in its entirety is very difficult to manage: intensification takes place at the level of each individual link, even when this is not beneficial for the intensification of the entire chain. Creating organized responsibility for maximizing efficiency of the entire chain instead of striving towards efficiency of the individual link is an enormously complicated challenge.

Wezel et al. (2015) identified three major concepts of intensification, i.e. sustainable intensification, ecological intensification, and agroecological intensification, but noted that all three concepts are actually poorly or imprecisely defined, often misused, or unclear in their practical implications. They tried, in a comparative manner, to analyse the three concepts, the use of these terms, their definitions and the underlying principles, practical implications, and operationalization, both in agricultural practices and in policies or laws. They observed some differences in these three major concepts. Like Petersen and Snapp (2015), they concluded that sustainable intensification is generally and imprecisely defined and tends towards business-as-usual, much more so than the other two concepts that seem more nuanced and more explicitly defined. Ecological intensification puts more emphasis on ecological processes in agroecosystems. Agroecological intensification appears to be more explicit on systems analysis and includes more specifically cultural and social aspects. From these papers, it is obvious that sustainable intensification has become degenerated into a vague phrase that can be