New crops on the block: effective strategies to broaden our food, fibre, and fuel repertoire in the face of increasingly volatile agricultural systems.

Summary

This review paper, published in the Journal of Experimental Botany, examines the scientific and agronomic strategies needed to bring new or underutilised crops into broader agricultural use across food, fibre, and fuel sectors. The authors likely synthesise evidence on the biological, economic, and systemic challenges that constrain crop diversification, including breeding bottlenecks, market development, and agronomic integration. The paper contributes to a growing body of work advocating for more diverse cropping systems as a response to the increasing volatility of modern agricultural systems driven by climate change and geopolitical pressures.

Regional applicability

The findings are broadly applicable to UK agriculture, where crop diversification is increasingly discussed in the context of post-Brexit agricultural policy, the Sustainable Farming Incentive, and net-zero commitments; novel crops such as camelina, hemp, and grain legumes are of particular relevance to UK arable systems.

Key measures

Crop diversification indices; adoption barriers; agronomic performance of novel crops; end-use suitability for food, fibre, and fuel applications

Outcomes reported

The paper likely reviews and evaluates strategies for introducing and scaling underutilised or novel crops into mainstream agricultural systems, assessing barriers and enablers to adoption. It probably examines how crop diversification can contribute to resilience in the face of climate variability, supply chain disruption, and monoculture dependency.

Topic tags