Impacts of future biological-technological progress on arable farming

This article deals with biological-technological developments in crop production and their impacts on arable farming within the next 20 years. Possible future technological developments are evaluated with the help of a Delphi survey. The impacts of promising new technologies are estimated by means of a Linear Programming model under three different scenarios. An important outcome of the model calculations is that crop production is strongly influenced by the economic and political environment. The most promising improvements are offered by new technologies which enhance labour productivity. Competitive new technologies can cause unbalanced crop rotations with non-desirable ecological effects and substantial changes in agricultural commodity market