Agronomy and Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger

Agronomy, as the science and practice of crop production, is the thread that ties and underpins the SDGs of Hunger, Health, Water, Work, Consumption, Climate and Land – in short seven of the SDGs and, thus more than any other sector. As a science, agronomy is defined as the study of the interactions between genotype, environment and management (GxExM) and, as a practice, as the implementation of agronomic knowledge into growing food. Knowledge can come from theories, experience and experiments, but best following the interaction of these elements. Agronomy is concerned with both producing food but also its nutritional quality. The social aspect of agronomy is evidenced in the gender balance between agronomic scientists, advisors and practitioners and farmers.

Agronomists work at scales ranging from square metres to the hectares of a field; agronomy’s biological scales go from individual plant organs to plant populations via the individual plant. Complex agronomy covers crop communities; the temporal scale ranges from a day to a year. Fields are the meaningful sites for integrating reductionist plant sciences.

Agronomists need to have a broad and integrated scientific knowledge; this includes soil and earth sciences chemistry, biology, crop genetics and ecology and social sciences, reflecting GxExM. Understanding the myriad of interrelationships between biotic and abiotic ecosystem components means that agronomy needs to focus on ways to predict and project the GxExM of food production by using simulation models and other tools, such as statistical analyses. Many of these tools and techniques originated in crop science and agronomy. In summary, agronomy tries to improve the systems that humans use to produce food, feed, fuel, and fibre by understanding the interactions, and thus integration, of crop genotype, environment and management.

In the context of the UN SDGs, agronomy and hunger have a clear interaction; health includes the provision of nutritious food, agronomy uses large quantities of water; work in agronomy highlights gender differences; food consumption and waste are as important in food security as food production; climate and weather have huge effects on food production and land is the essential planetary resource for producing food.

As part of an innovative collection showcasing agronomy in the context of the SDGs, this Research Topic will focus on Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger.
Zero hunger encompasses combating all forms of malnutrition, globally. This includes combating the “double burden”, which includes inadequacy (i.e. malnutrition and all its forms-stunting) and excess (obesity). As the global population is projected to reach 9 billion by mid-century, it is imperative that differences in access to sufficient food of nutritious quality are addressed. Agronomy has a key role to play in food security and nutrition. Evidence shows the key contribution of soil management to crop nutrition and human health with crops grown on well-managed plots (i.e. with organic matter inputs) yielding crops with higher micronutrient concentration compared to crops grown on poorer soils.
Biofortification, an approach encompassing the production of micronutrient biofortified crops and the use of micronutrient-based fertilizers are cost-effective approaches which contributes to the alleviation of deficiencies in the farming family. Research on biofortification is ongoing, however, collaborative research is key to meeting SDG2.

Keywords: sustainable development goals, nutrition, food security, soil-management, biofortification

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.