Crop physiology, the technology and the production gap

Crop physiology is a bridge between plant science and agronomy. Historically, crop physiology uses advanced technologies that rely on biochemical and biophysical plant traits to promote on-farm technological innovation that significantly contribute to increased plant production. Looking back and forward in the decadal scale, crop physiology is a prominent player in the reduction of plant production gap. The current plant production gap results from the growing world population and the stagnation of plant production. To reduce this gap, the plant production must be increased in the near future and continue to increase with population. In our opinion, there are two important concerns that aggravate this scenario and impose a great challenge to crop physiologists in the next few years. Firstly, a past decade of little crop yield gain. Second, the requirement that any increase in plant production should occur in a sustainable way, with minimal or no increases in land occupation, besides water and nutrients inputs. This great challenge is thought to be solved by transdisciplinary efforts to quickly incorporate new scientific discoveries and technological advances in practical applications in crop science. It is evident that crop physiology is the catalyst to such interaction. In this venture we let our opinion by philosophically discussing some contributions of crop physiology that, we believe, deserve to be explored as possible paths to reduce the plant production gap in the future, especially the implementation of technology to techniques used to overcome environmental factors in a systemic phenotyping approach.