Resilient production systems within planetary boundaries (KB-53-000-002)

How can we produce enough healthy food for everyone within the natural limits of our planet? Crop production systems play a key role in this.  What might production methods look like in 2050, and what crops should we breed for such systems?

 

In this project, we want to translate a vision for a sustainable food system into actual agricultural practices and breeding goals. Future food production faces numerous challenges: we need enough healthy food to feed everyone, and we must produce it in a sustainable, safe and ethical manner, i.e. within the limits of the planet. All this while our climate is changing. How can we take all these aspects into account when designing new crop production systems?

 

There are various methodologies for designing crop production systems, but these mostly focus on the near future or only take a few aspects into account. We would like to broaden the design methodology to integrate a long-term perspective (2050) and new technological developments (e.g. AI, robotics) in order to arrive at a crop production system that operates within planetary boundaries. We will assess crop production systems based on cultivation and environmental performance. In doing so, we will pay special attention to plant health as a central aspect of resilience. Economic and social performance are equally important, but we will not focus on these in this project. Scaling down a vision to actual cultivation practices and breeding goals is a challenge, but a necessary step to bring a vision to life. That is why we are focusing on the Netherlands to design two cultivation systems: i) a controlled system/covered cultivation and ii) a managed system in open ground. However, the design methodology will be widely applicable.