The southern highlands of Ethiopia are home to some of the planet’s oldest agricultural systems, dating back 10,000 years (Brandt et al. 1997), and are considered a global center of crop diversity (Vavilov and Chester 1951). The highland landscape is made up of a patchwork of small, diverse subsistence farms, grasslands, and forests where the lines between ‘human’ and ‘natural’ are indistinct, ...

Background: Changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks significantly influence the atmospheric C concentration. Agricultural management practices that increase SOC stocks thus may have profound effects on climate mitigation. Additional benefits include higher soil fertility since increased SOC stocks improve the physical and biological properties of the soil. Intensification of agriculture and...

Agriculture in the United States faces major challenges for the 21st Century; it is at a pivotal stage in terms of integrating societal demands for sustainability and enhanced quality of life from agricultural lands. A growing understanding that farms play key roles in provisioning a wide range of ecosystem services is converging with a surge in public interest in the sustainability of farming ...

Recent studies suggest that human activities accelerate the production of reactive nitrogen on a global scale. Increased nitrogen emissions may lead to environmental impacts including photochemical air pollution, reduced visibility, changes in biodiversity, and stratospheric ozone depletion. In the last 50 yr, emissions of ammonia (NH3), which is the most abundant form of reduced reactive nitro...

The Green Revolution, through the adoption of new crop varieties, irrigation, and agrochemicals, saved about 1 billion people from famine by increasing global food production (FAO 2011). We now recognize that these enormous gains in agricultural production were accompanied by harm to agriculture’s natural resource base, jeopardizing our future ability to meet human food, fuel, and fiber needs f...

The impact of agricultural practices and soil management on the communities of arthropods living in the agricultural landscape is acknowledged as a critical issue by the literature, and it needs to be better investigated to improve the ecological sustainability of agriculture. In the present study, we aimed to study how soil management affect carabid species distribution in one of the most typi...

Sustainability of agricultural landscapes depends largely on land-use practices. As one of the most productive and widespread agricultural soils, loess is often deep and easily eroded, posing grand challenges for environmental sustainability around the world. One prime example is the Loess Plateau of China, which has been cultivated for more than 7500 years. Based on long-term data sets, this s...

The present study aimed to investigate the organic agricultural products supply chain in Iran and provide a processes maturity framework for this chain based on the Iranian Standard of the organic products. Accordingly, the model, proposed in this research, provides an improvement tool that addresses the integration of company's internal processes at low levels, and the integration of the proce...

Antimicrobial resistance (AR) represents a global threat in human and veterinary medicine. In that regard, AR proliferation dissemination agricultural soils after manure application raises concerns on the enrichment of endogenous soil bacterial population with allochthonous antibiotic genes (ARGs). Natural resilience background concentrations ARGs play key roles mitigation propagation natural e...

More than three decades have elapsed since the passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act with its stated goal of zero discharge of pollutants into the nation's waterways. Yet, water quality remains poor in many locations and considerable loading of pollutants continues. This is particularly true for agricultural sources of water pollution and is typified by the Upper Mississippi River ...