Agricultural legacies, food production and its environmental consequences

摘要

Near the end of Proust's famous novel Remembrance of Things Past, the protagonist at last comes to understand that a person's present can only be understood in the context of their past. In PNAS, Sattari et al. (1) remind us the same is true for ecosystems. Focusing on the present and future of agriculture, the authors argue that a legacy of excess fertilizer use has caused soil phosphorus (P) to accumulate in the world's traditional breadbaskets and enhance recent crop yields. Further, they suggest those past P deposits can delay a potential crisis in global P supply (2). Their work is the latest contribution to a debate about one of society's fundamental challenges: how do we feed a growing population while minimizing agriculture's collateral damage on finite resources and the environment (3, 4)?