Regionally tailored diversified cropping systems to enhance global food security

Global agriculture production faces the challenge of producing sufficient food for feeding 8 billion people while reducing agriculture-driven environmental impacts.Current agricultural simplification comes with serious fertilizer squander and biodiversity loss, despite its high yield. Diversified cropping systems that consciously increase crop diversityby intercropping or rotation, represents a key strategy for sustainable agriculture and thus offers an opportunity to address this challenge. However, worldwide yield increment of diversified cropping and its environmental suitability remain elusive. Here, by synthesizing 5,874 yield observations from 747 studies, we demonstrate that diversified cropping significantly enhanced yield of major staple cropswith intercropping by 12%and rotation11%.Yield response of intercropping is primarily driven by mean annual temperature and more pronounced in regions with low soil carbon and nitrogen content, whereas that of rotation is mainly determined by duration and benefits more in opposite soil conditions. By employing machine learning algorithms, we estimate that intercropping and rotation could respectively boost yield of global major staple crops by 394 and 207 million tons annually, tailoring them locally could exceed 470 million tons—feeding over 2.5 billion people. Overall, we highlight the pressing necessity for the swift the adoption of diversified cropping systems for enhancing global food security.