Ensuring global food security and protecting the environment at the same time is perhaps the single greatest scientific challenge currently facing humankind (Cassman, 2012). To meet this challenge, breeding crops for improved yield capacity, optimizing the use of land, water, and nutrient resources, and enhancing stress resilience and yield stability in response to unpredictable weather patterns will be required (Sinclair et al., 2020). To assess the potential benefit of the various approaches to increase crop productivity, we propose that crop modeling is an important component of such an evaluation.