Transitioning towards dynamic, nature-based crop defenses.

Abstract

The Anthropocene is posing extraordinary challenges for global agriculture. Agri-food production is increasingly impacted by concurrent biotic and abiotic stressors, climate-triggered pests or diseases, (pesticide) resistance breakdown and the unrelenting appearance of invasive biota. Farmers have relied upon simple, addon constitutive crop defenses and synthetic pesticides for decades, but those tools prove ever more defunct. Here, we argue that dynamic, pluralistic and adaptable crop defenses can safeguard harvests in the face of erratic pest threats. When transitioning towards such nature-based crop defenses, plants prove an infinite source of inspiration. Inducible and/or indirect defenses that rely upon trichomes, sugar rewards, substrate-borne vibrations, plant volatiles, root exudates or allelochemicals have become the center of scientists' attention. The ensuing plant health innovations regularly rely upon the action of resident beneficial organisms, are low-cost, practicable and environmentally sound, and custom-made for more resilient forms of agriculture. By thus harnessing on-farm biodiversity and agroecological processes, agri-food production can be intensified without disregard of human or environmental health, or 'One Health'.