Tolerant crops increase growers’ yields but promote selfishness: how the epidemiology of disease resistant and tolerant varieties affect grower behaviour

Summary

This modelling study examines how disease-resistant and disease-tolerant crop varieties create fundamentally different economic incentives that shape grower behaviour at the population level. Tolerant varieties benefit only their users and reduce overall community yields, incentivising widespread adoption through a negative feedback loop. Resistant varieties generate positive externalities by reducing disease pressure for all growers, but this allows non-users to 'free-ride' on others' management efforts. The work demonstrates how epidemiological properties of crop varieties interact with grower decision-making to produce distinct patterns of deployment and population-scale disease control.

UK applicability

The findings are directly relevant to UK crop disease management policy and breeding priorities, particularly for cereals where both resistant and tolerant varieties are deployed. Understanding these behavioural dynamics could inform extension advice and breeding strategy to promote adoption of varieties with positive community-level outcomes.

Key measures

Grower adoption rates of resistant versus tolerant varieties; population-scale disease pressure; yield outcomes for adopters and non-adopters; economic incentives and feedback loops

Outcomes reported

The study modelled how grower behaviour responds to the deployment of disease-resistant versus disease-tolerant crop varieties, measuring resulting population-scale disease pressure and yield outcomes across a farming community.

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