Agricultural production challenge

Agricultural production worldwide faces huge challenges to achieve the UN Sustainability Development Goals and international agreements with respect to environment (depletion of scarce resources, global warming, acidification, eutrophication, nutrient losses, and biodiversity loss), labour (availability of skilled workers), and society (consumer/societal acceptance of production methods and novel technology). Further optimization of current farming practices with precision agriculture (PA) and precision livestock farming (PLF) technologies will not be sufficient to meet these challenges.

Shift
A paradigm shift is required for the next-generation agricultural production systems that are sustainable, circular and regenerative.

Research proposals
In this concept, called Technology for Ecology-based Farming, biological and ecological principles in farming are leading in the development of new farming systems, and by that the required technological knowledge, principles and tools. Instead of opposing high tech to nature-based production, we explore how current and future farming technologies can enable and support truly ecology-based farming systems. In this we combine expertise in the field of biology, ecology, agronomy and technology.

In our research proposals we defined the following four principles for ecology-based solutions and strategies:

• Rely on natural processes as driver for agricultural ecosystems and primary productivity;
• Sensing of traits should focus on a) following biological production processes instead of momentary states, and b) on biological and ecological traits in the systems instead of production traits and problem indicators only;
• Modelling should focus on understanding of the underlying biological and ecological process;
• Control and management should focus on prevention of problems, and make smart use of biological diversity and ecological complexity.

Our program consists of two closely related multi-year projects:

• A fundamental research programme, Synergia: SYstem change for New Ecology-based and Resource efficient Growth with hightech In Agriculture
• An applied research programme, AGROS: Evolution to sustainable AGRicultural Operation Systems