MINI REVIEW article
Front. Agron.
Sec. Climate-Smart Agronomy
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fagro.2025.1663528
This article is part of the Research TopicSmart Agriculture and Sustainable Crop Production: Enhancing Resilience to Environmental StressesView all articles
Promising trends in agricultural practices towards food security: Expanding the desert landscape and flora into mainstream farming
Provisionally accepted
- 1ICAR - Central Institute for Arid Horticulture, Bikaner, India
- 2Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India
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Rapid climate change and degrading quality of once-fertile agricultural lands makes it imperative to turn attention towards marginal and desert lands for practice of farming. Additionally, wild xerophytes (desert plants) have been successfully thriving on such lands of extreme temperatures and water scarcity, and provide important clues for traits desired in food crops (such as stress tolerance). In past, the local human communities have derived nutrition from the underexplored (semi)arid plants during drought and famine. Latest technological innovations like application of clay nanoparticles and xerophyte-derived rhizobacteria, vertical farming, horticulture crop-based site management, and restoration of degraded agricultural lands using native and climate-resilient plant varieties offer a glimpse of hope. Therefore, (i) farming of popular food crops (like Solanum lycopersicum using techniques like drip irrigation) on desert lands, as well as, (ii) bringing desert plants (such as the superior varieties of tree legumes like Prosopis cineraria) into mainstream agriculture are two approaches that have shown promise. These actions would also align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, viz.: SDG 2 (Zero hunger), SDG 12 (Responsible consumption and production) and SDG 13 (Climate action) in particular. Through the current article, we intend to highlight recent success stories on desert landscapes/plants and present the way forward for sustainable agriculture in future.
Keywords: Desert plants, sustainable agriculture, horticulture, farming trends, Climate Change, Technology
Received: 10 Jul 2025; Accepted: 07 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Berwal, Deepa and Sharma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Pankaj Kumar Sharma, pankajsharma@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in
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