Plant And Seed Health In Organic Systems: Embedded In Or Disconnected From Interactions With Microbial Communities?

Summary

A wide range of different, sometimes mutually exclusive, approaches to plant health are practiced within organic farming and seed systems. Plant health management may seek to completely exclude plant pathogens from growing environments and seed systems in a mechanistic, reductionist perspective. On the other hand, it may also aim at resilient cropping systems, involving plant defense mechanisms and complex microbial communities in a more holistic approach. How organic communities define and manage plant health will have implications on the design of organic seed systems and farm agrecosystems, as well as on future research agendas. Debates on approaches to plant health have been sparked within community seed networks in France and Belgium. Based on practical experiences and on a review of interdisciplinary literature ranging from crop ecology to microbiology to the social sciences, the options available to organic agriculture in terms of plant and seed health are elucidated.