Beyond modelling wheat physiology: what do system agronomists need?

Agronomic research often looks at the interaction between crops or crop varieties, the biophysical environment where they grow and the management carried out to obtain the desired goods and services from those crops. Although empirical research has dominated in the history of agronomy, crop models have helped in the last decades to integrate knowledge and information, and formalize the main processes governing crop growth and development. Crop specific models (i.e., wheat) have greatly contributed to understand the potential for crop production as well as yield variability under specific environmental and management conditions, understanding the factors responsible of the yield gap (and their inter‐linkages) and provide guidelines for improved crop production. However, from an agronomic perspective, there is a great need to improve models to formalize complex cropping systems rather than single crops. This would help agronomists guide and interpret their experimental results, understand the main factors affecting cropping systems performance, design alternative cropping systems and explore their performance under changing climatic and management conditions. In this contribution to the workshop we highlight some of the main model improvements agronomists need from modeling colleagues to tackle the relevant questions for their work at different scales (from the plant to the cropping and farming systems), with special emphasis on wheat‐based cropping systems.