After Posdam in 2022, l’Institut Agro Rennes-Angers, in collaboration with INRAE, will welcome in Rennes (France) the 18th Congress of the European Society for Agronomy (ESA) from Monday 26 August (evening) to Friday 30 August 2024.
The upcoming congress will explore:
- Synergies of technologies
The art of field cultivation essentially involves optimising the interplay between plants (genotype G), environmental conditions (E), and applied management (M). Various technologies support this continuous quest for economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable agriculture. Technologies include, but are not limited to, mechanical and digital tools, data sources, simulation modelling, artificial intelligence, and breeding that offer new options for the management of agroecosystems under climate change. However, the potential of these recent innovations has been investigated in isolation, and less is known about their combined, synergistic potential. The synergistic use of technologies can foster exploring a novel GxExM optimisation. In this track, we invite contributions that address solutions to ethical, environmental, and economic issues related to technologies, particularly where resource efficiency, yield stability and workability have been demonstrably improved by the synergy of newly introduced technologies.
- Synergies between disciplines
Climate change and biodiversity erosion pose challenges and risks for agriculture that are difficult to address with commonly used agronomic practices, such as fertilisation, irrigation, crop protection, and tillage. Agriculture itself is also contributing to climate change and environmental degradation. In addition, agriculture is dependent on input of resources, many of which are non-renewable, and we are reaching a point where these resources are becoming critically limiting for food, feed and fiber production. Agroecological solutions supporting resilient systems based principles that nature has developed over millions of years may be a way forward to revert these negative trends. This direction is a great challenge for agriculture as resilience is an emergent property with many internal (soil-plant interactions) and external regulations (management practices, climate). The perspective of soil-plant interactions, diversification measures, and improved management practices to create resilient cropping systems brings new scientific and practical questions and a need for dialogue between disciplines. In this track, we invite contributions that address perspectives on the plant-soil nexus of nature-based solutions for renewing agriculture and preservation of natural resources under climate change. This includes, for example, ecological studies on plant interactions, plant-microbe interactions, considerations in plant breeding programs, and innovative amendments and fertilisers.
- Synergies between short- and long-term goals
It is challenging to develop sustainable solutions for satisfying both essential short-term goals and long-term private and public aims because of their potential trade-off relationships such as the allocation of limited resources. Agricultural stakeholders are facing huge short-term challenges and societal pressures and the manifestations of this discomfort appear everywhere in the EU. Yet, they need to explore sustainable strategies for long-term goals including biodiversity and ecosystem conservation. Exploring synergistic solutions between short- and long-term goals require systems thinking and approaches combining technical, market, social and policies aspects across multiple scales. Finding synergies requires a novel farming system design that includes understudied aspects like workload and risk mitigation; and opening barriers within food systems and commodity chains to find new opportunities. It also requires a cross-scale thinking to consider the landscape and larger levels for exploring solutions for multiple stakeholders. In this track, we invite contributions that address field works, modelling, and conceptual research to explore these new venues.
- Synergies between researchers, farmers and society
Looking to the future, transformation and innovation in agricultural systems are needed to improve resilience and adaptive capacity of farms to face multiple challenges such as impacts of climate change, price surges, geopolitical crises. Achieving this will require strong integration and collaboration between researchers, society and farmers. In particular, there remains a gap between the generation of agronomic studies and scientific knowledge, and the implementation of downstream solutions at landscape-, farm- or field-levels. This track will focus on actionable knowledge generation and translation to bridge this gap, including co-production of knowledge together with farmers, policy-makers and other stakeholders. This can include a variety of collaborative approaches like on-farm experimentation, demonstrations, workshops, living labs, serious games or Decision Support Systems and apps design. In this track, we welcome contributions from social scientists, geographers, economists, and researchers of other disciplines, to broaden the discussion with agronomists. Submissions may cover different themes, including -but not limited to- current agricultural transitions, innovative climate change solutions, structural barriers, trade-offs and conflicts of interest, and education and training.
Last update: 2024-01-29, 12:32
