Comparing sustainability claims with assurance in organic agriculture standards

Enacting standards in organic agriculture

GM Crops, Organic Agriculture and Breeding for Sustainability

The ongoing debate about the use of genetically-modified (GM) crops in agriculture has largely focused on food safety and genetic contamination issues. Given that the majority of GM crops have been produced to respond to the problem of crop yield reductions caused by diseases, insects and weeds, the paper argues that in those cases, the currently used GM crops are an unstable solution to the pr...

Affordable, fact-oriented assurance with OMG standards

The OMG fact-oriented approach to assurance allows full traceability between the system facts and the assurance claims, so that the system facts can be gathered by automated tools and used as evidence to justify assurance claims. OMG Software Assurance Ecosystem defines a stack of standards to enable interoperability for tools, services and machine-readable content for assurance of existing sof...

Trichoderma in Organic Agriculture

Biocontrol, or Biological Control, can be defined as the use of natural organisms, or genetically modified, genes or gene products, to reduce the effects of undesirable organisms to favour organisms useful to human, such as crops, trees, animals and beneficial microorganisms. This strategy of control is ecologicaly clean and compatible with different models of agriculture: organic, biological a...

Quantifying the sustainability of agriculture

The rural sustainability index is a scientifically based tool to quantify the performance of agriculture. The sustainability of crop production is quantified from three perspectives; people, planet and profit. Within each perspective, one condition was selected that must be met to warrant agriculture. These are: No hazardous work should be used within the crop production chain; agricultural cro...