Climate-resilient agronomy: Innovations for sustainable agriculture in the Anthropocene

Agriculture is now facing the perfect storm of climate change, increasing costs of fertilizer, water, and energy, and increasing food demands from a larger and wealthier human population. These factors point to a global food deficit unless the efficiency and resilience of crop production is increased. The paradigm of agricultural research and practice in the last half-century has been largely defined by soil-water-plant relationships. The intensification of agriculture, which has focused on improving production under well-defined, optimized conditions, typically with significant agronomic inputs, has brought significant increases in crop yields, allowing the global population to exceed 7 billion by 2013. At the same time, however, this intensive cultivation of a limited number of crop species has drastically narrowed the number of plant species humans rely on, and jeopardizes long-term food security in the face of changing environmental conditions. Since the Pleistocene, 10,000 years ago, it is estimated that about 7,000 plant species have been cultivated; yet today, just three wheat, maize, and rice provide 70% of the world’s energy intake. In a world where optimal conditions for agriculture are becoming less predictable, a new agricultural paradigm is required, one of diversified, resilient agricultural systems that can adapt to the range of environmental conditions expected in a changing climate. Climate-Resilient Agriculture (CRA) should reduce dependence on high-input, ecologically damaging growing practices and increase the diversity and thus the resilience of the agricultural systems. The first five years of the “Anthropocene”, a period when human activities dominated the current terrestrial state, have been marked by extreme, unusual global events, ranging from the Japanese Tsunami in 2011 to the reversal of the July 2007 sub-arctic Beaufort High (under the form of cyclones) to repeated droughts in the US and Africa during 2012-2013. There will be economic consequences to the changes in weather patterns; indeed, US market indices showed the trend of having a negative return of investments after January 2012.