The Loess Plateau in China receives lots of attention from around the world. The expansion of bad agricultural practices for hundreds of years aggravated the soil erosion on the Loess Plateau, however, and a lot of efforts were and are being made to reduce the serious soil erosion as well as regional poverty. Agricultural development of the Loess Plateau is still confronted with intricate chall...

Almost all intensive row-crop ecosystems depend on external chemical inputs such as nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides for their high yields. This dependency has had important consequences for the environment and for ecosystem services (MEA 2005; Swinton et al. 2015a, Chapter 3 in this volume) that underpin these systems’ long-term sustainability (Robertson and Swinton 2005). Well-known conseq...

Given an agricultural watershed containing a set of spatial units, and a set of land management practices, the Geodesign Optimization (GOP) aims to find a land management practice for each spatial unit that optimizes overall water quality improvements in the watershed under both budget constraint and spatial constraints (e.g., minimum contiguous area, shape) arising from farm equipment operatio...

The Lean philosophy is increasingly being implemented, both in industry and the public sector. Examples of this include Produktionslyftet (The Production Leap) and Verksamhetslyftet (an educational project helping hospitals and municipalities in their work to implement lean principles in their organizations), two larger programmes that have been researched by academia. For more information abou...

Agriculture began in the eastern Mediterranean Levantine Corridor about 11000 years ago toward the end of the Younger Dryas when aridity had diminished wild food resources. During the subsequent Climatic Optimum, agricultural villages spread rapidly but subsequent climatic changes on centennial to millennial scales resulted in striking oscillations in settlement, especially in marginal areas. N...

This paper reviews relevant literature on the sustainability indicators theoretically proposed and practically applied by scholars over the past 15 years. Although progress is being made in the development and critical analysis of sustainability indicators, in many cases existing or proposed indicators are not the most sensitive or useful measures in developing countries. Indicator selection ne...

Organic farming has become increasingly popular in the world. This is mostly attributed toescalating consumer concerns over the impacts of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on humanhealth as well as growing concerns over environmental pollution derived from modernagricultural practices, such as rising greenhouse gas emissions and water contaminations. Butdoes organic farming actually displace...

Agricultural sustainability refers to the ability of a cropping system to produce, without causing irreversible damage tothe ecosystem. There is an increasing need to view cropping systems and identify management practices in a holisticindicator-based impact assessment. The main objective of this study was to compare and rank the cropping systems of theMarvdasht plain in Fars Province; in order...

Since the mid-1990s, genetically engineered (GE) crops have swept across the nation’s landscape to now cover approximately half of all cropland. While the United States is the undisputed leader in GE crops adoption and use, farmers in many other countries also are adopting them at increasing rates. Despite rapid adoption rates, GE crops have not been without controversy. Depending on the groups...

A conservative projection shows the world's population growing by 32% (to 9.5 billion) by 2050 and 53% (to 11 billion) by 2100 compared with its current level of 7.2 billion. Because most arable land worldwide is already in use, and water and energy also are limiting, increased production of food will require a substantial increase in efficiency. In this article, we highlight the importance of ...