ABSTRACT
Agricultural production is facing several serious challenges at the global level. Food security needs to be achieved for a growing world population (Gerland et al., 2014) that is fast changing its eating habits, with increasing demand for animal protein (Lassaletta et al., 2016). Simultaneously, food production needs to reduce its increasing ecological footprint (Crist et al., 2017), especially the negative impact of intensive high-input agriculture on biodiversity (Wilting et al., 2017). Resources on which agriculture depends are limited, so that resource use of agricultural production systems needs to decrease. Soil degradation and desertification (Bloem and Dunbar, 2016) as well as climate change pose additional complex factors limiting and disrupting the potential of agricultural systems to deliver food security and to decrease the likelihood of undernourishment (Dawson et al., 2016).
