The debate on the relative benefits of conventional and organic farming systems has in recent time gained significant interest. So far, global agricultural development has focused on increased productivity rather than on a holistic natural resource management for food security. Thus, developing more sustainable farming practices on a large scale is of utmost importance. However, information con...

Throughout Central and South Kalimantan, Indonesia, strongly acidic soil (pH 2.1-3.7) is widely distributed, and the local acidic soil-tolerant plants, including local rice varieties, often possess sphingomonads in their rhizosphere and rhizoplane. To investigate the behavior of sphingomonads inhabiting the rhizosphere of such acid-tolerant plants, we designed 13 different DNA array probes (eac...

Agroforestry on small-scale farms has potential to provide important ecological services, such as carbon sequestration and maintenance of biological diversity, while also providing on-farm products for domestic use and marketing. Payments for environmental services (PES) are an increasingly popular mechanism for encouraging production of ecological services on agricultural lands and may also co...

In organic farming, as crops production is directly depending on soil quality, farmers pay attention to preserve soil ecosystem in order to benefit from better ecological services. Today, soil conservation practices, such as ploughless soil tillage and cover cropping, have gained prominence in organic cropping systems and provide for great potentials such as maintaining or increasing soil ferti...

This study uses a generalized stochastic frontier framework to model a multiple-output rice production system and analyses farm-level technical inefficiency of rice farming in Assam, India. Primary data for this study was collected in 2009-2010 from 310 farm-households in four non-contiguous districts of Dhubri, Morigaon, Dibrugarh, and Cachar that are located in different agro-climatic regions...

Agribusiness managers as the major players in the agricultural industry greatly determine agribusiness practices and affectperception about agricultural sustainability. This study develops a framework to analyze how agribusiness students, the future agribusiness managers, in California view sustainable agriculture. An educational program was created and implemented to raise awareness and educat...