Summary
Crop and pasture production encompass managed systems that deliver food, fodder and fibre while interacting with soil, water and climate to shape resource use, yield stability and environmental outcomes. Arable crops rely on judicious rotations, soil fertility management and mechanisation to optimise seasonal harvests. Pasture systems integrate grasses and legumes to sustain grazing ruminants, leveraging biological nitrogen fixation and canopy diversity to maintain productivity across wet and dry periods. The balance of annual and perennial species, tillage intensity and stocking rates determines soil organic carbon dynamics, greenhouse-gas fluxes and hydrological resilience. Emerging practices—precision fertilisation, cover crops, diversified rotations and mixed crop–livestock operations—seek to intensify production without degrading soils or waterways. By coupling agronomy, ecology and livestock management, crop and pasture production can meet rising demand while conserving air, water and biodiversity at field and landscape scales.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Field trials on the North China Plain compared a traditional wheat–maize sequence with diversified rotations that inserted sweet potato, peanut and soybean. Diversification raised equivalent yields by more than one-third, cut nitrous oxide emissions by nearly two-fifths and bolstered microbial activity, delivering combined gains in food output and soil health. A thirty-year study in a temperate Mollisol found that perennial grasslands and rotationally grazed pastures maintained deep soil carbon stocks, whereas continuous row-crop and alfalfa systems lost organic matter at rates approaching one megagram of carbon per hectare per year. A global synthesis of agronomic experiments has identified a suite of management measures—including optimised fertiliser timing, reduced tillage and enhanced crop–livestock integration—that could slash cropland nitrogen losses by up to 70%, raise nitrogen-use efficiency by over 10% and generate net societal benefits at low cost.
Topic trend for the past 5 years
The graph below shows the article count in Nature Index journals for crop and pasture production.
* The ‘Current Index’ represents data for a 12-month rolling window, the current window is 1 May 2025 - 30 April 2026.
Technical terms
Crop rotation: The planned sequence of different crops grown on the same field over successive seasons to disrupt pests, balance nutrient demands and improve yield stability.
Legume-based rotation: A cropping sequence that includes nitrogen-fixing legume species to enhance soil fertility, reduce reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and improve subsequent crop yields.
Nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE): The ratio of crop nitrogen uptake to total nitrogen applied, indicating how effectively fertiliser inputs are converted into harvestable product.
Soil organic carbon stock: The mass of carbon stored in soil organic matter per unit area, a key indicator of soil health, fertility and long-term carbon sequestration potential.
Agent-based model (ABM): A computational framework in which autonomous “agents” represent farms or farmers that follow behavioural rules and interact to produce system-level outcomes, useful for exploring policy impacts and adoption dynamics.
Notable articles in crop and pasture production
- Diversifying crop rotation increases food production, reduces net greenhouse gas emissions and improves soil health. Nature Communications (2024).
- Cost-effective mitigation of nitrogen pollution from global croplands. Nature (2023).
About these summaries
This Nature Research Intelligence Topic summary is created with the cited references and a large language model. We take care to ground generated text with facts, and have systems in place to gain human feedback on the overall quality of the process in line with our AI principles. We strive to create accurate and useful summaries for people unfamiliar with the research topic and that supports this goal. These pages are a beta release and will be updated as we learn how best to help people gain value from a research topic summary.
Research
Position of Crop and Pasture Production in Nature Index by Count
Leading institutions
Collaboration
Top 5 leading collaborators in Crop and Pasture Production
Collaborating institutions
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