News Release

MADISON, WI, JANUARY 21, 2008 -- Agriculture's achievements over the last 10,000 years have been remarkable, particularly in the 20th century with the advances of technology. Future agronomic challenges – demands on the food supply and the biomass output -- pit productivity vs. sustainability. Kicking off the Centennial volume of Agronomy Journal in the January/February 2007 issue is an article highlighting the history of agriculture coupled with a sobering look at the agronomic challenges facing our future.

“Identifying the technological wellspring from which increased rates of productivity will be obtained in the decade ahead is far less obvious than during the last century,” writes the paper’s author, author, Fred P. Miller of Ohio State.

Demand for nonfood biomass is accelerating says Miller, and it couples with the already weighty challenge for agronomists to double global food output within the next four-plus decades.

“The task ahead centers not only on the necessity to produce humanity's food and biomass requirements, but whether agronomists and their allied partners can deliver this productivity in an ecologically sustainable manner through socially accepted production systems,” he continues.

He points to the irony in the factors that contributed to humanity's transition to agriculture more than 10 millennia ago. It was climate change that triggered the recession of the last Ice Age. Climate change is once again on the agenda of challenges that agronomists and their allied agriculturalists must address in the design and management of future production systems.

“Such a challenge will require different metrics to measure agricultural sustainability and garner public support, new funding sources, and more holistic institutional arrangements,” he writes. “This inextricable nexus with nature will endure as a preeminent component of humanity's future well-being. It is imperative, therefore, that the ecological foundation of this human-nature-agriculture interconnectedness be sustained.”