After the Second World War, with food supplies being badly insufficient, the “Marshall Plan” as well as a policy of high producer prices provided incentives to reconstruct the agricultural production potential in Western Europe. Soon production surpluses began to emerge, and despite the high price levels farm incomes did not rise in proportion to production and productivity. Already in 1950 a d...

Since the first regulatory approval of a genetically engineered (GE) plant was issued in 1992, hundreds of additional GE plants, thousands of regulatory decisions and millions of tons of GE grain and seed have been produced. In an increasingly global economy, the grain and seeds move relatively freely across national jurisdictions, but the regulatory deci...

The goal of microbiome engineering is to manipulate the microbiome toward a certain type of community that will optimize plant functions of interest. For instance, in crop production the goal is to reduce disease susceptibility, increase nutrient availability increase abiotic stress tolerance and increase crop yields. Various approaches can be devised to engineer the plant-microbiome, but one p...

Agricultural systems are situated within social and political environments that have tremendous influence on how they operate. If agricultural systems are to be sustainable, it is critical to understand how they are influenced by social and political factors. An expert panel approach was used to identify and rank the importance of social and political factors on agricultural systems in the US a...

The Florida vegetable industry relies heavily on plasticulture technologies from the transplant nursery through the packing house and market chain. The value of the Florida vegetable industry has consistently risen while the acreage has declined for many commodities. The use of greenhouse technologies for high-valued crops is an alternative method of crop production that would compliment the cu...

Between 1906 and 1917 China (under the Imperial and then Republican regimes) enacted a highly effective intervention to suppress the production of opium. Evidence from British Foreign Office records suggest that the intervention was centred, in many areas, upon a highly repressive incarnation of law enforcement in which rural populations had their property destroyed, their land confiscated and/...

Agrifood firms in the modernizing/globalizing world, both in developing and developed countries, regularly need to undertake innovations. They develop supply chains to accommodate the nature of the innovations. In this paper we analyze an innovator’s supply chain design problem. The design of the supply chain may include allocating resources between production of feedstock (agricultural product...

Strategic management is defined as a set of management decisions and actions that determine a company's long-term performance and lead and control the organization so that it can quickly respond to some internal and external environmental changes. Obviously, the agricultural sector and natural resources are one of the most significant economic sectors of the country because of their vital role ...

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...