Crop Breeding for Low Input Agriculture: A Sustainable Response to Feed a Growing World Population
By Tiffany L. Fess, J. Kotcon, Vagner A. Benedito. 2011
117 citations recorded by the source corpus.
World population is projected to reach its maximum (~10 billion people) by the year 2050. This 45% increase of the current world population (approaching seven billion people) will boost the demand for food and raw materials. However, we live in a historical moment when supply of phosphate, water, and oil are at their peaks. Modern agriculture is fundamentally based on varieties bred for high performance under high input systems (fertilizers, water, oil, pesticides), which generally do not perform well under low-input situations. We propose a shift of research goals and plant breeding objectives from high-performance agriculture at high-energy input to those with an improved rationalization between yield and energy input. Crop breeding programs that are more focused on nutrient economy and local environmental fitness will help reduce energy demands for crop production while still providing adequate amounts of high quality food as global resources decline and population is projected to increase.
Subfields: Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7d00aed01ad340c076b6f9956e58b634cd5536c2
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In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest (2014, background): “About half the producers, mostly poor, do farming to feed themselves and their families; they produce 20% of the world’s food (Fess et al. 2011).”
- The Use of Proline in Screening for Tolerance to Drought and Salinity in Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Genotypes (2020, background): “Therefore, such genotypes are probably more competitive in low-input agriculture and represent a source of allelic richness that may enhance agronomic production under the foreseeable restrictive conditions imposed by climate change [26].”