Conveners
Increasing biodiversity for improving resiliency of farming systems
- Maitane Juárez Mugarza
- Vincent Faloya
Introduction
In the face of climate change, improving the stability of food production systems is critical. Increasing diversity in agricultural fields can be a way to stabilize production across time and/or space. Variety mixtures represent a practical way to introduce diversity at the genotype level (Kopp, 2023). In Switzerland, variety mixtures remain rarely used, due to uncertainties and...
- Introduction
Cultivar mixtures are increasingly used as a practice to diversify crops, notably for cereals such as wheat. Cereal mixtures typically yield higher than the individual components grown in monoculture, although with notable variability (Borg et al., 2018). This variability stems from plant-plant interactions within mixed stands, resulting in diverse plant phenotypes, a...
Crop diversification is increasingly promoted as a mean to improve the sustainability of agriculture while maintaining a sufficient level of food production [1]. Intercropping is a farming practice that combines at least two crop species in the same field for most of their growing periods [2], and where the two components are harvested and eventually sorted. Since plants vary in their...
Introducing service crops into rotations may help to reduce dependency to inputs. Service provision largely depends on biomass production (Vrignon-Brenas et al., 2016b). Relay intercropping into winter cereal may favor conditions for service crop emergence, without impairing cereal yield (Gardarin et al., 2022). Nonetheless, this technique is complex and service crop establishment could fail,...
Introduction
In recent years intercropping (IC) has increased in prominence in research globally and produced a large legacy of empirical evidence. A bibliometric study on cereal-legume IC found 4735 articles and revealed that on a continental scale most publications originated from Asia (China 785, India 626), followed by the Americas (1003) and Europe (943) (Landschoot et al., 2024)....
Cover crops (CCs) are known to improve soil fertility and cash crop performances. Introducing CCs mixtures is a promising approach to increase multifunctionality of the ecosystem services provided by CCs. However, the effect of CC mixtures on subsequent crop yield remain contrasted. Indeed, the extent to which yields are increased by CCs depends on the type and management of CCs, the type of...
