(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with members affiliated with several institutions in France has found that lowering the amount of pesticides applied to crops does not have to mean lessening expected yields. In their paper published in the journal Nature Plants, the team describes their study of hundreds of French farms where pesticide use was varied to find out how much was actually needed. Vasileios Vasileiadis with Italy’s Institute of Agro-Environmental and Forest Biology, National Research Council offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.