The need for increased sustainability of performance in cereal varieties, particularly in organic agriculture (OA), is limited by the lack of varieties adapted to organic conditions. Here, the needs for breeding are reviewed in the context of three major marketing types, global, regional, local, in European OA. Currently, the effort is determined, partly, by the outcomes from trials that compare varieties under OA and CA (conventional agriculture) conditions. The differences are sufficiently large and important to warrant an increase in appropriate breeding. The wide range of environments within OA and between years, underlines the need to try to select for specific adaptation in target environments. The difficulty of doing so can be helped by decentralised breeding with farmer participation and the use of crops buffered by variety mixtures or populations. Varieties for OA need efficient nutrient uptake and use and weed competition. These and other characters need to be considered in relation to the OA cropping system over the whole rotation. Positive interactions are needed, such as early crop vigour for nutrient uptake, weed competition and disease resistance. Incorporation of all characteristics into the crop can be helped by diversification within the crop, allowing complementation and compensation among plants. Although the problems of breeding cereals for organic farming systems are large, there is encouraging progress. This lies in applications of ecology to organic crop production, innovations in plant sciences, and the realisation that such progress is central to both OA and CA, because of climate change and the increasing costs of fossil fuels.

A radical shift in our approach to crop production is needed to ensure food security and to address the problems of soil degradation, loss of biodiversity, polluted and restricted water supplies, coupled with a future of fossil fuel limitations and increasingly variable climatic conditions. An interdisciplinary network of European scientists put forward visions for future crop production embracing the complexity of our socio‐ecological system by applying the principle of diversity at all levels from soil micro‐organisms to plant varieties and cropping systems. This approach, integrated with careful deployment of our finite global resources and implementation of appropriate sustainable technology, appears to be the only way to ensure the scale of system resilience needed to cope with many of our concerns. We discuss some of the most important tools such as (i) building soil fertility by recycling of nutrients and sustainable use of other natural and physical resources, (ii) enhancing biological diversity by breeding of crops resilient to climate change and (iii) reconnecting all stakeholders in crop production. Finally, we emphasise some of the changes in agricultural and environmental regulation and policy needed in order to implement the visions. Copyright © 2009 Society of Chemical Industry