Realizing resilient food systems: Developing perennial cropping systems

In recent decades, many ecologists have focused intensively on trying to address agroecological problems like N and P loses, pest evolution, soil erosion, weed invasion, soil carbon loss, and overwhelming dependence on fossil energy, without deeply questioning the underlying agro-ecosystem model that we've inherited from Neolithic farmers.  The very nature of our dominant cropland ecosystem—monospecific stands of annual grains in a very early stage of ecological development maintained through tillage or chemicals—is not resilient.  If ecologists were to fundamentally redesign agriculture, embodying what we know about how ecosystems develop and function, what would it look like?