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...

Sustainability in agricultural is determined by aspects like economy, society and environment. Multi-objective programming (MOP) model has been a widely used tool for studying and analyzing the sustainability of agricultural system. However, optimization models in most applications are forced to use data which is uncertain. Recently, robust optimization has been used as an optimization model th...

‘Facilitating sustainable agriculture’ is an agricultural extension paradigm based on farming systems practice and the actor-oriented perspective on rural development. The challenge for agricultural extension is to facilitate a convergence of conflicting interests within a forum governed by the principle of communicative rationality. An initial stakeholder analysis is advised as a first step to...

Sustainable agriculture is a complex problem that demands consideration of many interrelated factors, processes, and institutions. Unfortunately, current definitions of sustainability are expansive, and use as a guide for strategic planning or decision making is clouded by ambiguity and a plethora of definitions. Regardless of how sustainability is defined, agricultural producers are interested...

This paper describes a comparative analysis of alternative methods of constructing composite indicators to measure the sustainability of the agricultural sector. The three methods employed were Principal Component Analysis, the Analytic Hierarchy Process and a Multi-Criteria technique. The comparison focused on the irrigated agriculture of the Duero basin in Spain as a case study, using a datas...

Climate change has profound consequences for the agriculture of south-eastern Australia and its climate-induced water shortage in the Murray-Darling Basin. Post Keynesian Economics (PKE) macro-dynamics, along with Kaleckian investment and growth theory, are used to develop an ecological-economic system dynamics model of this complex nonlinear river basin system. The MurrayDarling Basin Simulati...

With the mobility and off-farm employment of rural villagers, agricultural production has been influenced by the absence of labor force in the past few years. In particular, the inadequate assignment of resources has threatened the sustainability of some Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems due to their low profit. In this paper, the influences of labor force and capital on agricult...