Review: High-yield farming is essential to slow biodiversity loss

It’s 2025, and although we live in a world saturated with information, is increasingly difficult to sort fact from propaganda or fiction. This is true in all arenas, including plant science. Calls for strategies to improve crop yields are sometimes met with criticisms that higher yielding crops would only serve “big ag” or further harm biodiversity. That’s why I enjoyed reading this well-researched but accessible review article by Bamford et al. that lays out the need for high-yield farming to “bend the curve” of biodiversity loss, part of a special issue honoring the legacy of biodiversity researcher Georgina Mace. (You can find the rest of this special issue here https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2025/380/1917). The authors address several issues, including the fact that feeding the human population “remains the pre-eminent threat to wild nature” and that so-called “land sharing” strategies (in which wildlife cohabitates with agriculture) don’t work very well. Therefore, they call for “land sparing”, which means keeping farming’s footprint as small as possible, through increasing yields. These yield increases can come aboutthrough crop improvement but also through making sure farmers have access to and are using best practices, such as integrated pest management and drip irrigation. The final paragraph of their article sums up the social challenges eloquently, have a look. (Summary by Mary Williams @PlantTeaching.bksy.social @PlantTeaching) Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0216