Socio-ecological factors determine crop performance in agricultural systems.

Agricultural production systems are affected by complex interactions between social and ecological factors, which are often hard to integrate in a common analytical framework. We evaluated differences in crop production among farms by integrating components of several related research disciplines in a single socio-ecological analysis. Specifically, we evaluated spring barley (Hordeum vulgare, L.) performance on 34 farms (organic and conventional) in two agro-ecological zones to unravel the importance of ecological, crop and management factors in the performance of a standard crop. We used Projections to Latent Structures (PLS), a simple but robust analytical tool widely utilized in research disciplines dealing with complex systems (e.g. social sciences and chemometrics), but infrequently in agricultural sciences. We show that barley performance on organic farms was affected by previous management, landscape structure, and soil quality, in contrast to conventional farms where external inputs were the main factors affecting biomass and grain yield. This indicates that more complex management strategies are required in organic than in conventional farming systems. We conclude that the PLS method combining socio-ecological and biophysical factors provides improved understanding of the various interacting factors determining crop performance and can help identify where improvements in the agricultural system are most likely to be effective.

Trade-offs between seed output and life span - a quantitative comparison of traits between annual and perennial congeneric species.

Perennial plants allocate more resources belowground, thus sustaining important ecosystem services. Hence, shifting from annual to perennial crops has been advocated towards a more sustainable agriculture. Nevertheless, wild perennial species have lower seed production than selected annuals, raising the questions of whether there is a fundamental trade-off between reproductive effort and life span, and whether such trade-off can be overcome through selection. In order to address these questions and to isolate life span from phylogenetic and environmental factors, we conducted a meta-analysis encompassing c. 3000 congeneric annual/perennial pairs from 28 genera. This meta-analysis is complemented with a minimalist model of long-term productivity in perennial species. Perennials allocate more resources belowground and less to seeds than congeneric annuals, independently of selection history. However, existing perennial wheat and rice could achieve yields similar to annuals if they survived three years and each year doubled their biomass, as other perennial grasses do. Selected perennial crops maintain the large belowground allocation of wild perennials, and thus can provide desired regulatory ecosystem services. To match the seed yield of annuals, biomass production of perennial grains must be increased to amounts attained by some perennial grasses - if this goal can be met, perennial crops can provide a more sustainable alternative to annuals.