BY CSM STAFF WRITER

Crop yield is an important agricultural metric that determines the amount of produce per land unit that ultimately gets on our tables as food. Needless to say, it has a direct impact on global food security constantly threatened by conflicts, natural hazards, economic shocks, and a growing population. By 2050, there will be an estimated 9.8 billion people, and to provide enough food for all, including feed for livestock and feedstocks for the evolving bioenergy market, crop yields have to double at the very least.

Improving crop yield entails a host of benefits for crop producers, consumers, and the environment. Higher crop yields mean increased food availability, reduced costs of staple foods, and higher farmer incomes. Additionally, by growing more, farmers can unlock access to seeds and other inputs of better quality to further boost cropland productivity and future yields. 

The only question is: how to get there? Following the current agricultural paradigm and treating arable land as an infinite, cheap resource will only intensify the current food crises and cause more detrimental outcomes for our planet. We need to put sustainability at the heart of agriculture to produce more crops in the limited space and unstable climates. In this piece, we’ll explore the common bottlenecks to crop productivity and strategies for eliminating them and boosting crop yields sustainably. 

Major Causes of Low Farm Yields

There’s a whole science behind crop cultivation – a process that involves multiple variables that affect plant growth and, eventually, make or break the growing season for farmers. No wonder, crop yield prediction remains a challenging task, which may lead to bumper crops (a yield higher than expected) or crop yield gaps (a yield lower than expected) following the harvesting. Let’s take a closer look at the main groups of factors that can take a toll on crops.

Environmental factors

• Soil: Fertile healthy soils are reservoirs of essential water, nutrients, and rich soil biodiversity required for proper plant growth and high crop productivity. Natural processes combined with intensive farming practices often lead to the deterioration of soil’s quality, structure, acidity and salinity, water-holding capacity, nutrient availability, and other properties, making it unfit for sustaining plant life. For example, soil acidity stress may cause a maize crop loss of up to 70%.  

• Weather: Irregular rainfall, intense droughts, and temperature extremes – from freezing cold to blazing hot – alongside weather calamities (floods, hurricanes, hailstorms) are becoming the new normal of agriculture, causing cold, heat, and water stress in crops and eating away at farmers’ profits. Some of the most recent examples of climate-affected crops include cocoa (El Niño hit West Africa, causing a soar in cocoa prices) and soybeans (drought-hit Argentina saw a 27% yield drop compared to the previous year).

Biological factors

• Pests, Weeds, and Diseases: These factors account for 20 to 40% of annual crop losses worldwide and include animal pests (insects, nematodes, mites, slugs, rodents, birds, mammals), weeds, and pathogens (viruses, fungi, bacteria). 

Crops often fall prey to swarms of soilborne or above-ground insects that feed on their leaves, roots, and fruit, as well as transmit various pathogens causing plant diseases. 

Climatic variations also create favourable conditions for pathogen multiplication and migration, affecting plants in various ways – from reducing their biomass and numbers to hampering their CO2 absorption ability to robbing them of nutrients. 

One of the current concerns is the increased resistance of pests to herbicides and pesticides caused by their overapplication and climate variability, which puts crop yields under threat.

Technological factors

Here we can include all agronomic and management practices, farm machinery, inputs, modern agritech and agriscience such as precision agriculture and genetically modified crops. Let’s look at the most common ones:

• Irrigation: Giving too little water can disrupt some of the vital processes in plant development and growth: impact photosynthesis, hinder nutrient circulation, and cause wilting from turgor loss. Giving too much water is no less harmful for roots may start to rot, causing stunted crop growth and eventual death.

• Tillage: Excessive tillage involves consistent soil disturbance, causing its compaction, accelerating soil erosion, and provoking the spread of fungi and other pathogens. All in all, such practice creates unfavorable conditions for growing crops.

• Fertilization: High crop yields require maintaining a balance of nutrients available to plants. Without fertilizers, nutrient-poor soil can never yield well; with too many chemical fertilizers, in the long run, soil will lose fertility making crop cultivation more challenging than it used to be.

Strategies for Boosting Crop Productivity and Yields

A cropland’s efficiency is determined by how much agricultural produce it produces, and it’s every grower’s priority to fully utilize the land’s potential by maximizing crop productivity through well-weighed management. Here are a few methods and practices that can help ensure that a farmer’s prediction of crop yield will match the harvests at the end of the season:

1. Maintain soil health. 

Start from the ground up and ensure you are growing in healthy, fertile soils. Soil tests can provide data on the quality, pH, acidity, salinity, and nutrient content of your soils and serve as a guide to creating a proper growing environment for selected crop types. By implementing soil conservation practices and VRA technology, farmers can benefit not only soil health but also their crop yields.

2. Sow quality seeds. 

You reap what you sow – that’s why proper research and selection of suitable seeds is a prerequisite for abundant yields. Seeds weren’t made equal, so it’s necessary to consider climate, soil type, and other variables to make sure they thrive, not struggle in your field. For instance, drought-resistant corn and sunflowers will fit in arid farming regions, while asparagus and cabbage adapt well to wet soils. Quality and disease-resistance properties are just as important to consider in seed selection for achieving high plant populations.

3. Monitor crop health & manage stress proactively.

Modern technology allows for remote observation of crops through the use of satellites, drones, ground sensors, and related software. Web platforms and mobile apps collect and analyse a wealth of data on crops, weather, management practices, etc. to provide a regular overview of how crops perform and, most importantly, detect signs of abnormal plant growth that could mean a disease, pest infestation, water or heat stress are in place. With such tools at hand, farmers are fully equipped to manage potential yield limiters proactively, thus ensuring that crop losses will be minimal. 

4. Estimate future crop yields.

Forecasting crop yield well in advance of harvesting provides a rough estimate of a farmer’s income and expenses for optimal farm management; while at a national scale, such estimates are used by policymakers for timely decision-making regarding the import and export of agricultural commodities to ensure food demands will be met and at fair prices.

There are a lot of different crop yield forecasting methods in use – from calculating total crop yield based on the head/pod count and special formula to more sophisticated predictions that leverage AI, machine learning, and satellite data. Provided there’s enough accurate ground and Earth observation data for the given area, crop yield estimation using remote sensing can deliver an estimate with up to 95% accuracy nearly at any scale. 

5. Irrigate and fertilize efficiently.

Water and fertilizers are important agricultural inputs that affect crop productivity the most. That said, it is crucial to know the requirements of plants in every field zone and control the amounts of irrigation water and nutrient-charged inputs applied there. With VRA technology, farmers can get the best of both worlds: cut input costs by minimizing waste and maintain a healthy growing environment both in and around their farms.

Increasing crop yields to feed the world amid climate change and depleting natural resources is one of the defining challenges of our time. It’s only by putting sustainability front and centre of farming that we can learn to produce more and leave fertile soils – not dead dirt – as a legacy for future generations. Using technology to learn as much as possible about your soils and crops to grow more efficiently and sustainably will translate into higher crop yields and profits.