Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest
By J. Heinemann, M. Massaro, D. Coray, S. Agapito-Tenfen, Jiajun Wen. 2014
118 citations recorded by the source corpus.
An agroecosystem is constrained by environmental possibility and social choices, mainly in the form of government policies. To be sustainable, an agroecosystem requires production systems that are resilient to natural stressors such as disease, pests, drought, wind and salinity, and to human constructed stressors such as economic cycles and trade barriers. The world is becoming increasingly reliant on concentrated exporting agroecosystems for staple crops, and vulnerable to national and local decisions that affect resilience of these production systems. We chronicle the history of the United States staple crop agroecosystem of the Midwest region to determine whether sustainability is part of its design, or could be a likely outcome of existing policies particularly on innovation and intellectual property. Relative to other food secure and exporting countries (e.g. Western Europe), the US agroecosystem is not exceptional in yields or conservative on environmental impact. This has not been a trade-off for sustainability, as annual fluctuations in maize yield alone dwarf the loss of caloric energy from extreme historic blights. We suggest strategies for innovation that are responsive to more stakeholders and build resilience into industrialized staple crop production.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/256cd043f8eccd06e06e982f6eb167b785733d8c
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Agroecology: Principles for the Conversion and Redesign of Farming Systems (2016, background): “This uniformity is linked to economic and legislative forces that favour monocultures and simplification [3].”
- Re-registration Challenges of Glyphosate in the European Union (2018, result): “This strongly contradicts to earlier surveys (Heinemann et al., 2014; Benbrook, 2016; Perry et al., 2016), and is likely to be related to the fact that Kniss’ study considered 159 herbicide formulations of 118 herbicide active ingredients, while herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops are designed against 8 h”
- No scientific consensus on GMO safety (2015, unknown): “Some reviews and individual studies have associated them with increased herbicide use [45,46], the rapid spread of herbicide-resistant weeds [47], and adverse health effects in human and animal populations exposed to Roundup, the herbicide used on the majority of GM crops [48-50].”