Larry Phelan | Dept. of Entomology | OARDC | Ohio State University Managing the soil community to promote inclusive plant health and improve crop resilience The International Year of Plant Health highlights the importance of protecting crops against the onslaught of pest and disease in a sustainable manner. Meaningful progress towards this objective will require not just replacing environmentally disruptive pesticides with ones that are less so. Required is a fundamental understanding of the ecological drivers that make our agroecosystems so susceptible to biotic and abiotic stressors. We need to then redesign crop management, moving away from the sole goal of maximizing production. Rather, a more holistic production system is required that also promotes crop resistance to pests and resilience to unfavorable weather events. Illustrating the importance of a systems perspective for crop production is the growth in our understanding of the central role potentially played by the soil...