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 experiment, but best following the interaction of these elements. Computer models and data analysis form important tools for agronomy. Agronomy is concerned with both producing food but also its nutritional quality. The societal aspect of agronomy is evidenced in the gender balance between agronomic scientists, advisors and practitioners and farmers. Agronomy has the unique property of being a science but also a human practice.

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 12: Responsible Consumption and Production welcoming themes on (but not limited to):

• Developping and targeting crop phenotypes for enhancing agronomic water use efficiency (WUE), with a focus on root physiology
• The effects of agronomic practices, such as irrigation, cover crops, crop rotations, and soil tillage, on WUE at different spatial and temporal scales
• Methodologies for measuring water use efficiency and linking leaf-level to field-level WUE
• Interactions between WUE and other resource use efficiencies.
• Computer models of transpiration and water use in crops
• Links between WUE and crop yields

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Frontiers in Agronomy

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