Organic agriculture sparks a lively debate on its potential health and environmental benefits. Comparative studies often investigate the response of crops to organic farming through targeted approaches and within a limited experimental work. To clarify this issue, the transcriptomic profile of a cultivar of the potato grown for two years under organic and conventional farming was compared with ...

One issue of great concern to many researchers is the rapidly vanishing biodiversity in the face of intensive agricultural methods. Organic techniques offer an alternative, but evidence of their effects has often been based on studies that were poorly designed, limited in scope in terms of the species examined, or local in scale. Meta-analysis of published studies differing in methodology and s...

It is an essential goal of conservation biology to find a way to sustainably meet the food needs of an exponentially increasing population without damaging the environment and the ecosystem services it provides us. The difficulty with “sustainable agriculture” is that there is much disagreement as to what it entails and how to approach it. Thus far, the organic movement has dominated practices ...

This article examines the characteristics of and reasons for Norwegian farmers' ceasing or planning to cease certified organic production. We gathered cross-sectional survey data in late 2007 from organic farmers deregistering between January 2004 and September 2007 (n=220), and similar data from a random sample of farmers with certified organic management in 2006 (n=407). Of the respondents de...

being an environment friendly and more sustainable farming system. Ironically, scientists one-half century Groundwater has become increasingly degraded by NO3, and this ago devoted much research emphasis to providing farmdegradation has been partially attributed to the use of commercial inorganic N fertilizers. Conversion from conventional fertilizer maners information on the beneficial use of ...

Offshore fish farming is predicted to increase in the near future driven by the lack of coastal space. In this review I discuss the environmental issues of offshore farming from experience in coastal farms. Even more so than in coastal farms, a rapid and wide dispersal of dissolved waste products is predicted for offshore farms. Despite wider dispersal of particulate waste products, fast sinkin...

Ovine meat production in France, which is continually regressing due to economic difficulties, is based on two main production systems. The first system is located in plains in which one part of the lambs born in the spring are fed grass, and the other part of the lambs are from out of the season parturitions following hormonal treatments and are fattened in sheep houses. The second system is r...