Can soil-less crop production be a sustainable option for soil conservation and future agriculture?

Agriculture faces huge challenges regarding sustainable use of soils and its sustainability performance in general. There are three different approaches to sustainable agricultural production commonly proposed, namely intensification, agro-ecological approaches and high-tech industrial approaches. Often, some propose that only agro-ecological approaches are truly sustainable options, with particular benefits for soil protection, while others argue that intensification or high-tech performs better through land sparing. In this viewpoint, we scrutinize the notion of “sustainable agricultural production” and the role these approaches may play for such, in particular addressing the controversy of “naturalness” versus “artificiality” in production systems. Consumers often perceive agriculture as “natural”, but agriculture today thrives always on strong human intervention. We posit that agriculture is linked to soils and natural processes, but that this provides little guidance on what sustainable agriculture should be. Being “natural” need not be an aspect of being sustainable. If it is, arguments for this need to be provided. Furthermore, revealed consumer preferences may much less frequently posit being “natural” as a central criterion for food consumed than usually assumed. By all this, we do not want to promote any of those three approaches uncritically. We rather argue for enlarging the option space for sustainable agriculture in an unprejudiced way.