Agriculture is facing up to an increasing number of challenges, including the need to ensure variousecosystem services and to resolve apparent conflicts between them. One of the ways forward for agriculturecurrently being debated is a set of principles grouped together under the umbrella term “ecologicalintensification”. In published studies, ecological intensification has generally been considered to be basedessentially on the use of biological regulation to manage agroecosystems, at field, farm and landscapescales. We propose here five additional avenues that agronomic research could follow to strengthenthe ecological intensification of current farming systems. We begin by assuming that progress in plantsciences over the last two decades provides new insight of potential use to agronomists. Potentially usefulnew developments in plant science include advances in the fields of energy conversion by plants,nitrogen use efficiency and defence mechanisms against pests.