Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Assessment [MA], 2005). Yet, the living components of soils and their multiple interactions
above- and belowground still receive relatively little attention globally in agriculture.
Here, I enlarge the discussion of biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems from the cur-
rent focus on soil parasites and pathogens to a broader overview of soil biodiversity; this is
particularly needed when planning for long-term sustainability of ecosystems worldwide.
Sustainability, a concept of treating the environment carefully so that the needs of future
generations may be met, is not new and has been employed from the time of the earliest
hunting and farming societies as resource limitation of one form or another affected the
ability to catch prey or produce food. I begin with several examples of global environ-
mental agreements and policies that have already focused attention on components of soil
biodiversity, discuss the role of soil biodiversity in the provision of ecosystem services, and
conclude with a discussion of biocontrol or disease regulation as a service. Ecosystem ser-
vices here are defined according to the global analysis of the MA (2005) as benefits people
obtain from ecosystems. These benefits were termed provisioning services (e.g., food, fiber,
and clean water), regulating services (e.g., climate regulation, disease regulation), cultural
services (e.g., aesthetic, recreation, spiritual values), and supporting services (e.g., primary
production, decomposition, and soil formation).
Globally, agriculture is faced with dynamic and complex challenges, with the most urgent
being the growing demand for food production, particularly in the developing world, as
populations and consumption increase. This, compounded with interactions of multiple
issues of climate change, increased demands for energy, water scarcity, land-use change
and biodiversity loss, and the necessity to develop solutions that include knowledge of
ecosystem services, presents formidable obstacles for all (Zimmerer, 2010). Facing the
simple statistics, it is estimated that by 2050 nearly 30-40% more food will need to be
produced with about half the inputs and on a decreased area of agriculturally produc-
tive lands (Fedoroff et al., 2010; Godfray et al., 2010; Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2011). Past
efforts that modernized agriculture and vastly increased food production were achieved
by creating homogeneous large-scale solutions using irrigation and chemical inputs across
heterogeneous landscapes, often unaware of the growing need for using principles of sus-
tainability. The concepts developed for these intensive large-scale agricultural systems
have been reexamined for more innovative small-scale and site-specific management
options, including new farming systems, agricultural biotechnology, and consideration
of organisms from multiple trophic levels to improve food production and global sustain-
ability (Fedoroff et al., 2010). Crop production systems are no longer regarded as isolated
ecosystems. Instead, they are included in broader implications of sustainability science
through consideration of the benefits of interactions with nearby urban and wild lands,
by judicious use of water and chemical inputs, conserving present crop diversity, hosting
nonmarketable wild diversity, and altering the distribution of crops and their interactions
with pests, pathogens, and weeds.
Whether these changes will constrain or contribute to food production markets will
be balanced against the effects of multiple drivers (land-use change, climate change, nitro-
gen use, water availability) affecting agricultural dynamics. Human actions directly affect
agriculture through small-scale alterations of biological interactions or, at a larger scale,
through land use change. Pests and diseases, for example, were estimated as responsi-
ble for up to 40% of worldwide crop losses. Yet, there is little comprehension of how this
estimate might be affected with climate change (Garrett et al., 2006; Gregory et al., 2009).
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