e of 651. We may also anticipate a greater diversity of products the consumer is already familiar with and that offer benefits in nutrition, taste and other sensory qualities. In addition, future agriculture is expected to provide a totally new range of biorefining products that are deeply embedded in the bioeconomy and range from large volume chemical precursors to high-end materials for manufacturing or medical applications.
A main task I see is to get the communication on this topic streamlined: we should think in line with the 2050 goals of the Green Deal, and make near-time opportunities and situations more tangible: What does digital farming anno 2025 and 2030 mean? How to deal with biorefining options anno 2030? What skillsets would an EU farmer need by 2030? What would be the main concerns of NGOs by 2030? Getting a grip on how the new world may unfold, would create timely engagement of entrepreneurs, help direct risk funding and policy development, and pave the way for new directions in education. There are ample short-term actions we could take today to make the future of agriculture promising and that could address several of the negative impacts on the environment and be at the basis of a flourishing bio-based economy offering welfare to society.
ES: In terms of genetics and plant breeding, what are the main changes that need to be made?
MC: The lasting goals of plant breeding are known as “yield”, “yield” and “yield”, and a farmer’s move to more sustainable practices, is pro forma not changing this. Farm productivity is the result of a complex equation between choice of crop genetics, seed quality and preparation, field conditions, resource availability, pest and disease occurrence, applied agricultural practices, weather, both on a day-to-day level and on a climate level, and historic farming choices. The challenge is thus to decompose “farm productivity” and derive insight into which aspects have the greatest impact on sustainability, can be technically approached by breeding and/or agronomy, and offer a positive economic perspective.
As discussed above, there are lasting merits in improving yield and in reducing input requirements to lower non-fossil based GHG emissions. But as a way forward, targets are ideally derived from Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) metrics that have predictive value for both productivity and sustainability, and that take into account location-specific priorities. While waiting for a proper LCA-based benchmark to become publicly available, targets may develop already around requirements for soil, water and nutrients, and, most simply said, translate LCA parameters into actionable breeding and agronomy targets so that progress becomes measurable and communicable.
Personally, I would expect that yield stability becomes in future the key concern for farmers. Climate change and increased weather volatility will alter the condition of the fields, lead to an accelerated migration of diseases and pest, and, equally important, put an unprecedented stress on crops to handle volatile changes with greater extremities in e.g., sunlight, temperature, wind, humidity and water. Both the volatility and the greater extremities pose challenges to breeders, as the solution asks for a sophisticated and unprecedented control of e.g., stomata, roots, pigments and wax-layers.
It appears to me that in breeding it will be critical to leverage maximally in-depth insights about how genetics and biological processes determine the decision-making in the different crops when grown in different geographies and under different conditions, and to derive from there predictive breeding starting points. Along the same lines I see that the speed with which diseases and pest geographically migrate, is a multiple faster than today’s breeding can address. Also, here there is a benefit from deploying in depth know-how on the biology and genetic make-up of pests, diseases and crops to derive smart breeding starting points. In this respect it would be great if state-of-art biological information would be presented in a format tha