Intense agricultural practices are the leading cause of water, soil, and biodiversity degradation in Europe. Since the adoption of the Water Framework Directive 15 years ago, agricultural fertiliser and pesticides applications have been identified consistently as the leading cause of excess pollution loads both in surface waters and groundwater, and for aquatic species loss (Schäfer et al. 2007; Bieroza, Bol, and Glendell 2021). Similarly, the massive loss of insects, both in species diversity as well as in absolute numbers, can be traced back directly to the use of agrochemicals (Dudley 2022). Accordingly, soil biodiversity has suffered a significant toll and soil structure has been altered to a state where water absorption, retention and release for plant uptake has become difficult. Overall, there is thus a clear need to rethink agricultural practices not only to rescue the remaining healthy ecosystems but also to restore the degraded ones for the sake of agricultural production itself and our own human livelihoods (Giannakis et al. 2019; Boix-Fayos and de Vente 2023).
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