The decreasing availability of approved pesticide active substances in the European Union raises concerns regarding the resilience of European agriculture, particularly its reliance on herbicides. Little attention has been paid to herbicide-free mineral cropping management (HFM), as well as its performance and potential for relatively wider adoption. Herein, we aimed to investigate the effects of adopting such systems on the yields and agronomic stability of winter bread wheat and barley in metropolitan France from 2008 to 2022. Using the Agrosyst database attached to the DEPHY network, we compared the performances of current conventional farming (group 1, G1), conventional cropping that avoids using fall herbicides but uses other herbicides (group 2, G2), HFM farming (group 3, G3), and organic farming (group 4, G4). The results revealed that G3 accounted for 2% of the farming area under winter bread wheat cultivation and 3% under barley. The consistency of G3 was low over time, with 34.1% of wheat and 56.5% of barley plots in G3 using fall herbicides the following year when these crops were grown. Mechanical alternatives were more prevalent than in conventional plots but remained below G4 levels. A techno-economic analysis using the propensity score method to reduce confounding factors revealed that mineral nitrogen fertilisation was a key factor in sustaining high yields without the use of herbicides. For both crops, the average yield differences between G3 and G1 were not significant but remained considerably higher than those in organic farming. However, the small G3 sample sizes (n = 51 for winter bread wheat and n =14 for winter barley), warrant caution in interpreting these results. Reduced chemical protection costs enabled competitive profit margins even without subsidies.

Large quantities of glyphosate, a systemic non-selective herbicide, are applied in European fields each year despite the prohibition of glyphosate-tolerant crops. Comprehensive analyses examining the drivers often cited for glyphosate use have remained limited and focused on specific contexts. This work examines where, when, and why glyphosate is used in French agricultural systems by analyzing field, cropping system, and farm data. Using a national network of volunteer farms, we examined the real practices of French farmers in arable and mixed farming over an 11-year period. Just over half of the farms (53%) reported some use of glyphosate during the monitored years, with an average of 144 g.ha-1.year-1 a.e. (acid equivalent) among users. Glyphosate use varied between regions. Applications were frequently made after the harvest of winter wheat, particularly before sunflower, highlighting how crop sequence and regions influence use. The frequency of applications decreased over time, but doses increased to compensate for the development of perennial weeds. Shifts in use coincided with regulatory changes, including the withdrawal of products and increased taxes on the sale of pollutants, emphasizing that policies may play an essential role in shaping farmers’ strategies. There were no differences in the likelihood of use across moderate tillage regimes, suggesting that farmers may be adding glyphosate to their strategy, possibly to shift field operations earlier. Rotations with narrow windows for weed control may increase reliance on glyphosate, particularly when mechanical alternatives are not feasible. This study provides a foundation for future work by identifying key areas of interest and highlighting potential levers for reduction.

In an era marked by rapid global changes, the reinforcement and modernization of plant health surveillance systems have become imperative. Sixty-five scientists present here a research agenda for an enhanced and modernized plant health surveillance to anticipate and mitigate disease and pest emergence. Our approach integrates a wide range of scientific fields (from life, social, physical and engineering sciences) and identifies the key knowledge gaps, focusing on anticipation, risk assessment, early detection, and multi-actor collaboration. The research directions we propose are organized around four complementary thematic axes. The first axis is the anticipation of pest emergence, encompassing innovative forecasting, adaptive potential, and the effects of climatic and cropping system changes. The second axis addresses the use of versatile broad-spectrum surveillance tools, including molecular or imaging diagnostics supported by artificial intelligence, and monitoring generic matrices such as air and water. The third axis focuses on surveillance of known pests from new perspectives, i.e., using novel approaches to detect known species but also anticipating and detecting, within a species, the populations or genotypes that pose a higher risk. The fourth axis advocates the management of plant health as a commons through the establishment of multi-actor and cooperative surveillance systems for long-term data-driven alert systems and information dissemination. We stress the importance of integrating data and information from multiple sources through open science databases and metadata, alongside developing methods for interpolating and extrapolating incomplete data. Finally, we advocate an Integrated Health Surveillance approach in the One Health context, favoring tailored and versatile solutions to plant health problems and recognizing the interconnected risks to the health of plants, humans, animals and the environment, including food insecurity, pesticide residues, environmental pollution and alterations of ecosystem services.

A new 5-year Common Agricultural Policy has been in place since January 2023. Like its predecessors, this new policy will fail to deliver significant climatic and environmental benefits. We show how the Green Architecture of the policy relying on the three instruments of conditionality, eco-schemes, and agri-environment and climate measures could have been used more consistently and effectively. Our proposals are based on core principles of public economics and fiscal federalism as well as on research results in agronomy and ecology. Conditionality criteria are the minimal requirements that every agricultural producer must meet. Farmers should be rewarded for efforts that go beyond these basic requirements through eco-schemes for global public goods complemented by agri-environment and climate measures centred on local public goods. Eco-schemes should cover the whole agricultural area by targeting permanent grasslands, crop diversification, and green cover and non-productive agro-ecological infrastructures. We discuss trade-offs that our proposals could generate.

Reducing pesticide use has become a goal shared by several European countries and a major issue in public policies due to the negative impacts of pesticides on the environment and on human health. However, since most of the agri-food sector relies on pesticides in these countries, substantially reducing pesticide use is a complex issue. To overcome this situation, we argue that agricultural research has a major role to play and must adopt a pesticide-free paradigm to expect a deep impact on pesticide use. In this article, we explain why this new paradigm is needed and outline research fronts that it will help address. These research fronts are related to five strategies: (1) redesigning cropping systems to enhance prophylaxis, (2) diversifying biocontrol strategies and associated business models, (3) broadening the scope of plant breeding to include functional biodiversity and evolutionary ecology concepts, (4) setting new goals for agricultural machinery and digital technologies, and (5) supporting development of public policies and private initiatives for the transition toward pesticide-free agri-food systems. The corresponding research activities must be managed conjointly to develop systemic and coupled innovations, which are essential for reducing pesticide use significantly. We therefore provide examples of cross-cutting objectives that combine these fronts while also highlighting the need for interdisciplinary research projects. By doing so, we provide an overall orientation for research to achieve sustainable agriculture.

A profound transformation of agricultural production methods has become unavoidable due to the increase in the world’s population, and environmental and climatic challenges. Agroecology is now recognized as a challenging model for agricultural systems, promoting their diversification and adaptation to environmental and socio-economic contexts, with consequences for the entire agri-food system and the development of rural and urban areas. Through a prospective exercise performed at a large interdisciplinary institute, INRAE, a research agenda for agroecology was built that filled a gap through its ambition and interdisciplinarity. It concerned six topics. For genetics, there is a need to study genetic aspects of complex systems (e.g., mixtures of genotypes) and to develop breeding methods for them. For landscapes, challenges lie in effects of heterogeneity at multiple scales, in multifunctionality and in the design of agroecological landscapes. Agricultural equipment and digital technologies show high potential for monitoring dynamics of agroecosystems. For modeling, challenges include approaches to complexity, consideration of spatial and temporal dimensions and representation of the cascade from cropping practices to ecosystem services. The agroecological transition of farms calls for modeling and observational approaches as well as for creating new design methods. Integration of agroecology into food systems raises the issues of product specificity, consumer behavior and organization of markets, standards and public policies. In addition, transversal priorities were identified: (i) generating sets of biological data, through research and participatory mechanisms, that are appropriate for designing agroecological systems and (ii) collecting and using coherent sets of data to enable assessment of vulnerability, resilience and risk in order to evaluate the performance of agroecological systems and to contribute to scaling up. The main lessons learned from this collective exercise can be useful for the entire scientific community engaged in research into agroecology.