Breeding Beyond Monoculture: Putting the "Intercrop" Into Crops.

Area of Science:

• Agricultural Science
• Plant Breeding
• Sustainable Agriculture

Background:

• Monoculture agriculture leads to environmental issues like biodiversity loss and soil degradation.
• Intercropping presents a promising solution to mitigate these negative impacts while maintaining crop yields.
• Current agricultural practices and breeding programs are largely optimized for monocultures, not intercropping.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore the challenges and opportunities of intercropping as a sustainable agricultural practice.
• To identify technology-driven solutions for breeding crops adapted to intercropping systems.
• To propose integrated breeding strategies that combine ideotype and quantitative genetics approaches.

Main Methods:

• Reviewing the limitations of current plant breeding for monocultures.
• Identifying technological advancements in plant breeding, including ideotype-driven and quantitative genetics-driven methods.
• Proposing the integration of plant growth modeling, genomic-assisted selection, and indirect genetic effects.

Main Results:

• Existing crop genotypes bred for monocultures are not optimally suited for intercropping.
• New breeding approaches are needed to account for inter-specific interactions and compatibilities.
• Technology-driven strategies like plant growth modeling and genomic-assisted selection offer novel solutions.

Conclusions:

• Intercropping requires complex agricultural designs, specialized machinery, and adapted crop cultivars.
• Re-designing breeding programs to accommodate inter-specific interactions is challenging but feasible with new technologies.
• A combined approach integrating plant growth modeling with genomic-assisted selection and indirect genetic effects is the most promising path forward for future breeding programs.