ABSTRACT
The major challenge in modern agriculture is to sustain crop productivity in the face of ongoing environmental changes (Mahmud et al., 2016). There is also pressure to increase crop productivity to feed the ever-growing global human population. Abiotic stresses namely drought, salinity, high or low temperature, submergence, nutrient deficiency and so forth have an impact on crop yields. These suboptimal conditions restrict crop performance so that the plants do not reach their full genetic potential. Modern agriculture aims to maximise yield and stabilise production by optimising growing conditions and by making it adaptive to soil and climate conditions and resource application in order to prevent stress. The crop domestication traits and selection process has been mainly involved with improvements in yield, so even though the focus of modern agriculture is on maximising the genetic potential of crops, modern crop varieties lack the ability to adapt to less than favourable conditions, crop stresses and low-resource applications (Fess et al., 2011; Shomura et al., 2008). So, one of the challenges for agricultural intensification is breeding for variable environmental conditions and different stress patterns by maintaining crop genetic potential. This may also be referred to as ‘sustainable intensification’.
