A key challenge for humanity is how a future global population of 9 billion can all be fed healthily and sustainably. Here, we review how competition for land is influenced by other drivers and pressures, examine land-use change over the past 20 years and consider future changes over the next 40 years. Competition for land, in itself, is not a driver affecting food and farming in the future, bu...

Cell-based Multicriteria Evaluation (MCE) methods are used to analyse the land suitability evaluation. Land evaluation is carried out to estimate the suitability of land for a specific use such as arable farming or irrigated agriculture. land suitability evaluation is a prerequisite for land-use planning and development (Sys 1985; Van Ranst and others 1996). It provides information on the const...

Ecology may benefit from long term, large scale experiments on low intensity farming to test theoretical principles and convert them into practical lessons. One century of land conversion in the Argentine pampas, and its effect on critical ecological properties, were analysed and discussed. Land transformation has resulted in significant changes of land use, land cover, energy flow, nutrient dy...

Organic farming, a low intensity system, may offer benefits for a range of taxa, but what affects the extent of those benefits is imperfectly understood. We explored the effects of organic farming and landscape on the activity density and species density of spiders and carabid beetles, using a large sample of paired organic and conventional farms in the UK. Spider activity density and species d...

Agriculture has two ways to increase its output, expanding the land area under cultivation and improving the yields on cultivated land. If agricultural growth and performance taken to increase the farming incomes of rural families, then a third way can be added, i.e. shifting the product composition to higher value products. For decades, it has been commented that, globally the possibilities fo...

An interactive and participative approach to involve and mobilise rural communities in water quality control programmes was investigated. Agro-rural watersheds are experiencing serious environmental degradation mainly because of inappropriate land use practices due to various competing and opposing priorities in the community. The communities tend to concentrate on availability of land and wate...

Human population growth in the developing world drives land-use changes, impacting food security. In India, the dramatic change in demographic dynamics over the past century has reduced traditional agricultural land-use through increasing commercialization. Here, we analyze the magnitude and implications for the farming system by the introduction of cash-cropping, replacing the traditional slas...

Forest farming in North America is becoming popular as a way for landowners to diversify income opportunities, improve management of forest resources, and increase biological diversity. People have been informally " farming the forests " for generations. However, in recent years, attention has been directed at formalizing forest farming and improving it through research and development activiti...

This article analyzes agricultural sustainability in the context of land degradation, rural poverty and social inequality, taking China’s Loess Hills as an example. The analysis attempts to understand the multi-dimensionality of sustainability at the farm level and its relationship with physical-socio-economic-infrastructural-technological framework conditions in the context of the land set-asi...