Contemporary agriculture faces conflicting challenges due to the need of increasing production (i.e. food, feed, bio-energy) while simultaneously reducing negative environmental impacts. The heavy agricultural reliance on synthetic chemical pesticides or fertilizers for crop protection and crop nutrition is leading to soil, air and water pollution, as well as a dramatic decline of biodiversity and the degradations in ecosystem functioning. Agro-ecology principles are based on the recognition that biodiversity in agro-ecosystems can provide more than only food, fiber and timber. Hence biodiversity and its associated functions, such as pollination, pest control, and mechanisms that maintain or improve soil fertility, may improve production efficiency and sustainability of agro-ecosystems.

Integrating of cover crops into annual crop rotations presents an opportunity to increase ecosystem services provided by agricultural systems. Ecosystem services are functions provided by the environment that benefit humans and can be classified as provisioning, regulating, supporting, or cultural services. Integrating cover crops into annual grain cropping systems adds important temporal, taxonomic, and functional biodiversity. Cover crops can provide numerous ecosystem services, including soil quality, nutrient cycling, pest regulation and crop productivity.

Sustainable crop production intensification harnesses ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, biological nitrogen fixation, predation and parasitism, uses varieties with high productivity per external input and minimizes the use of technologies or practices that have adverse effects on human health or the environment.

In the integrated crop production it is emphasized that the external inputs and sophisticated technology are essential in agriculture. To be sufficient, agricultural systems must further intensify.

In the coming decades, human populations and income growth will drive agriculture to ever-higher intensities. Now it is time to guide this intensification in a way that enhances the delivery of ecosystem services. Delaying action will result in an environment further degraded and an agriculture that is more vulnerable to climatic extremes and pest outbreaks, and increasingly dependent on external energy and synthetic chemical inputs.

Keywords: sustainability, ecosystem services, biodiversity, cover crops