Building multifunctional agricultural through the interplay between land-sparing and land-sharing practices

Background/Question/Methods

The conversation concerning how we might feed a large and growing human population while doing minimum harm to the biosphere has become very polarized around the perspectives of land-sparing and land-sharing. In the form they are often presented in scientific and popular media, both the land-sparing and land-sharing concepts contain important elements of truth, but they also each contain glaring internal contradictions. For instance, while higher crop yields imply that less land area is needed to achieve a certain production target (land-sparing), historically increased yields have not generally been correlated with effective land conservation. On the other side of the debate, while many well-managed agricultural landscapes have been shown to support high-levels of biodiversity and ecosystem service provisioning (land-sharing), such research often overlooks that much of the ecological value is provided by fragments of uncultivated, semi-natural habitat that intersperse crop fields. In this presentation, I will attempt to unify the useful elements of the land-sparing and land-sharing concepts into the alternative concept of multifunctional agriculture, which I believe is a more constructive framework for harmonizing agriculture and the environment. 

Results/Conclusions

Essentially, this synthesis requires recognizing that modern agroecological methods can supply high crop yields while minimizing environmental externalities, but that a significant proportion of agroecosystem services must still be provided by fragments of uncultivated habitat which cannot also be used for food production. At the landscape scale, each of the multiple functions we strive to obtain from agriculture (food production, biodiversity preservation, water quality, greenhouse gas mitigation, etc.) can be improved both through land-sparing practices that set land aside as perennial habitat and land-sharing practices that change how crop fields are managed.  Moving forward, a key priority for agroecological research and policy should be to systematically explore the relative costs and benefits of both strategies for optimizing agroecosystem functions in the world’s major food producing regions.