Meeting future global staple crop demand requires continual productivity improvement. Many performance indicators have been proposed to track and measure the increase in productivity while minimizing environmental degradation. However, their use has lagged behind theory, and has not been uniform across crops in different geographies. The consequence is an uneven understanding of opportunities for sustainable intensification. Simple but robust key performance indicators (KPIs) are needed to standardize knowledge across crops and geographies. This paper defines a new term ‘agronomic gain’ based on an improvement in KPIs, including productivity, resource use efficiencies, and soil health that a specific single or combination of agronomic practices delivers under certain environmental conditions. We apply the concept of agronomic gain to the different stages of science-based agronomic innovations and provide a description of different approaches used to assess agronomic gain including yield gap assessment, meta-data analysis, on-station and on-farm studies, impact assessment, panel studies, and use of subnational and national statistics for assessing KPIs at different stages. We mainly focus on studies on rice in sub-Saharan Africa, where large yield gaps exist. Rice is one of the most important staple food crops and plays an essential role in food security in this region. Our analysis identifies major challenges in the assessment of agronomic gain, including differentiating agronomic gain from genetic gain, unreliable in-person interviews, and assessment of some KPIs at a larger scale. To overcome these challenges, we suggest to (i) conduct multi-environment trials for assessing variety × agronomic practice × environment interaction on KPIs, and (ii) develop novel approaches for assessing KPIs, through development of indirect methods using remote-sensing technology, mobile devices for systematized site characterization, and establishment of empirical relationships among KPIs or between agronomic practices and KPIs.

满足未来全球主要作物的需求需要不断提高生产力。已经提出了许多绩效指标来跟踪和衡量生产力的提高，同时最大限度地减少环境退化。然而，它们的使用落后于理论，并且在不同地区的作物中并不一致。结果是对可持续集约化机会的理解不一致。需要简单而强大的关键绩效指标 (KPI) 来标准化跨作物和地理区域的知识。本文根据 KPI 的改进定义了一个新术语“农艺收益”，包括生产力、资源利用效率和土壤健康，这些都是在特定环境条件下特定单一或多种农艺实践组合带来的。我们将农艺收益的概念应用于基于科学的农艺创新的不同阶段，并描述了用于评估农艺收益的不同方法，包括产量差距评估、元数据分析、现场和农场研究、影响评估、小组研究以及使用次国家和国家统计数据来评估不同阶段的 KPI。我们主要关注撒哈拉以南非洲地区水稻的研究，那里存在较大的产量差距。水稻是最重要的主粮作物之一，在该地区的粮食安全中发挥着至关重要的作用。我们的分析确定了评估农艺收益的主要挑战，包括区分农艺收益与遗传收益、不可靠的面对面访谈以及更大规模的一些 KPI 评估。为了克服这些挑战，