Dear Colleagues,

The increasing demand for crop products brings a lot of environmental impacts leading to soil degradation. Despite intensive soil fertilization and cultivation, the decrease in soil fertility associated with microbial life depletion in soil has become a global concern. Putting more costs into food production is not maximizing the effects, and sustaining biological life in soil seems to be a key factor in rewarding farmers' efforts to produce more and better quality food products. Soil degradation and low nutrient status leads to a problem of hidden hunger and crop’s yield potential. Conserving organic matter in soil improves nutrient cycling and increases soil nutrient status. Sustainable crop production cares about soil functionality and the environmental impacts of agriculture. Protecting soil biodiversity and soil organic matter, nutrient quality improvement, and reducing the usage of chemicals mainly pesticides and mineral fertilizers are the main tools in sustainable agriculture increasing soil-production potential. Moreover, facing the global problems with water shortage in soil sustainable crop production, the use of organic fertilizer and cultivation methods that will lead to the effective use of every drop of water by plants are important to sustain soil productivity and increase crop yields. Food products have a great impact on the quality and longevity of our life. From this perspective, sustainable crop production should focus more on crop quality.  Food plays an important role in the prevention of chronic diseases. As plants contain many bioactive compounds, the presence of good-quality plants in our diet is important. One of the strategies to sustain crop production is to design cropping systems that will enhance crop nutritional content and minimize environmental impacts. Agronomy, genetic engineering, and environmental specialists should drive these changes together and in our Special Issue we would like to invite experts from different research fields, dealing with sustainable crop production from different perspectives to publish a paper.

Dr. Agnieszka Medyńska-Juraszek
Prof. Dr. Cezary Kabala
Guest Editors

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• soil fertility
• soil biodiversity
• plant nutrition
• organic farming
• cover crops
• organic fertilizers
• biofortifications
• nutrient and water deficiency
• crop physiology
• genetic modifications in crops
• environmental impact of agriculture
• greenhouse gas mitigation from soil