Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
environment. In the coming decades, human population and income growth will
drive agriculture to ever-higher intensities. Now is the time to guide this intensifica-
tion in a way that enhances the delivery of ecosystem services that are not currently
marketed. Delaying action will result in an environment further degraded and an
agriculture further divorced from its biological roots, more vulnerable to climate
extremes and pest outbreaks, and increasingly dependent on external energy and
synthetic chemical inputs.
Systems-level research reveals how disparate parts of agricultural ecosystems
interact in subtle, often surprising, and sometimes crucial ways. Connections
among microbial community structure, the formation of soil organic matter, soil
water-holding capacity, plant drought tolerance, and primary productivity and her-
bivory are difficult to detect in the absence of research in which multiple parts of the
same system are studied simultaneously. And research that is too local and that fails
to consider relationships among different cropped and noncropped habitats within
the larger landscape will likewise fail to make apparent crucial opportunities for
designing future cropping systems that are productive, resilient, and able to deliver
a rich suite of ecosystem services. Systems-level research sufficiently reductionist
to identify key organism-level interactions and processes will be increasingly valu-
able for delivering worthwhile opportunities.
Some of these opportunities will be more generalizable than others. They will
all require adaptations to local environmental and economic conditions, and both
policy and research must include the need for flexible solutions, especially as new
genomic and other technologies enter the marketplace. Trade-offs and synergies
must be recognized and evaluated (e.g., Syswerda and Robertson 2014) in order to
design optimal systems for specific outcomes. Ultimately, modeling will be needed
to help design specific solutions for specific locales.
Research from the KBS LTER site reveals a number of worthwhile opportuni-
ties for delivering services today. Almost all of those opportunities are interdepen-
dent. Some of these interdependencies are synergistic, suggesting multiple paths
for farmer adoption; others are negative, suggesting the need for targeted incen-
tives for particular services important to society. Identifying such interdependen-
cies and how they respond to different management practices and environmental
change is a need in cropping systems everywhere and has never been more urgent.
References
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