A major challenge : feeding around 9 bilion people in the future

Agronomists are facing a major challenge—to invent and promote agricultural systems capable of providing a sufficient volume of top quality products to feed around 9 billion people in the future, hus ensuring peoples’ well-being and health, while also minimizing the environmental footprint of farming.

Agronomy Research Expertise in Montpellier and Languedoc-Roussillon

The research on crops and cropping systems is a key area of excellence of the Agropolis International scientific community.
Agropolis agronomists are striving to come up with sustainable solutions tailored to a range of different biophysical and socioeconomic situations:

• temperate, Mediterranean and tropical agriculture,
• large mechanized farms and smallholdings,
• local food production and cash and export crops,
• etc

The complementary expertise of these different research teams enables them to deal with the diverse range of complex issues and agricultural situations.

Publication date : 30/05/2010

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Current agronomy issues, approaches and complementary features

The following constituents account for the uniqueness of Agronomy in the scientific field:

• strong biophysical science foundations, through analysis, experimentation and modelling of the functioning of soil-plant-pest systems in crop fields, which are approached as complex systems.
• more recent, yet now well established (especially in France), foundations in research on farmers’ practices, which are considered as items subjected to socioeconomic factors that are assessed on the basis of biophysical and technical aspects of cropping..
• research firmly grounded on cropping system engineering, with its scientific interrogations focused more on problem solving than on specific processes or theories.
• this approach applies to a broad range of items ranging from plants to territories, in addition to cultivated fields and cropping systems on farms.....
  
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