Conference Cambridge Dec 2012.
What challenges?
The growing world demand for food. Scarcity of land and water. Ecological limits are almost reached. We must produce more with less environmental impact. Sustainable intensification.
Some believe that organic agriculture is the solution. But the production is too low. We need increases, not reductions. We need an ecologically better general agriculture.
What innovations?
Higher and more reliable yields. The ambitious English project Wheat 20-20 (20 tons/ha year 2020), a combination of plant breeding and agronomic development.
Better adaptation of inputs and resources. More efficient phosphorus fertilization, for instance placement (common in Sweden) and maybe foliar or seed application as complements.
Focus also on potassium and magnesium. Deficiencies, also shortterm, reduce stress tolerance and yields.
Cover crops. They reduce nitrate leaching and in addition provide organic matter and are positive for life in soils. They function also as break crops in rotations.
Manure is a great problem. Theoretically a good solution is to move animal production back to crop producing farms. Go back to mixed agriculture. But that does not work in our economic reality.
Two ways are worked on: to improve the manure efficiency at farm level and to process manure to marketable or at least transportable products which can be removed from the farm. However, it is not an easy problem to solve.
The longterm nitrogen efficency of manure is low. The most efficient method, injection, has a longterm efficiency of 55% compared to mineral fertilizer. In practice the efficiency today is only half of that.
A problem mentioned is that economic realities often do not permit use of improved agronomic measures. This a big problem for the world development.