Herd immunity in crops? Lessons from human epidemiology.

Herd immunity describes indirect disease protection in heterogeneous, partly immune populations. This concept is rarely discussed for agricultural crops, although crop heterogeneity can reduce pathogen transmission. We discuss disease suppression in diversified crop fields and illustrate how entire fields could benefit from treatment of individual plants, leading to herd immunity.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Trends in Plant Science

• Publication date

  2026-01-01

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tplants.2025.12.005PMID 41494885
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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