Almost all organisms live in groups, where they face the universal tension between selfishness and collective productivity. Like other social organisms, plants could often benefit by cooperating, or competing less, with their neighbours. In fact, most of the crops that feed our world have been bred to be dwarfed, so each plant spends less energy on being a tall competitor and more on making grains. However, most cooperative plant traits and their genetic basis remain undiscovered. My research combines social evolutionary thinking and modern genetic tools to understand the designs of competitive and cooperative plants in agriculture and in nature. I will present my current research with Arabidopsis and wheat and my future plans that ask: how can we find more cooperative traits and genes for improving agriculture? And can we discover examples where cooperation among plants has already been designed by nature?