Positive effects of intercrop yields in farms from across Europe depend on rainfall, crop composition, and management

Abstract

Modern “intensive” agriculture drives the biodiversity-climate crisis but is also central to global food security. Future farming needs management approaches that maintain (or even enhance) food production while reducing negative climate and biodiversity impacts. Intercrops could provide part of the solution, increasing biodiversity and boosting production with fewer inputs. However, barriers remain to their wide-scale uptake, in particular tailoring intercrops to local equipment, management practice, and environment. We analyze data from multiple trials of cereal-legume intercrops conducted on farms across Europe between 2018 and 2021. Our study is the first attempt, to our knowledge, to quantify the yield benefits of cereal-legume intercropping undertaken at commercially relevant scales for farms across Europe. We used crop performance ratio (CPR)—the ratio of the observed intercrop yield compared to the expected yield based on monoculture yields—as our metric of intercrop performance. Using CPR, we found a roughly 30% yield gain across all sites. However, CPR was modulated by a number of factors. CPR was not strongly affected by management except for the negative effects of direct drilling and the positive effects of organic fertilizer addition. CPR also depended on intercrop composition (number and identity of components), background yields (being highest where yields were lower), and rainfall (being higher with higher rainfall). Our findings allow us to reduce uncertainty about how intercrops will perform in realistic local farm conditions, give guidance for tailoring intercrops to local farming conditions, and provide key goals for further work to integrate intercrops into sustainable farming systems.