The majority of dairy farmers and processors in Australia and New Zealand are considered world class due to their ability to produce dairy products at a cost that is competitive on the world market without requirement for subsidy. International and domestic forces beyond the farm influence the international competitiveness of Antipodean dairy systems, as much or more than, the within-farm characteristics of the systems.

Traditional methods in agricultural economics and agricultural engineering have yielded mixed results when specifying the costs of an unfavourable parcel structure. Concepts related to travel costs and the production function are frequently applied when the costs of farming distant parcels are examined. However, farmers’ perspective regarding preferences for land use is ignored or partly overlapped by predictions made by researchers.

Herbivores are a significant source of nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions. They account for a large share of manure-related N₂O emissions, as well as soil-related N₂O emissions through the use of grazing land, and land for feed and forage production. It is widely acknowledged that mitigation measures are necessary to avoid an increase in N₂O emissions while meeting the growing global food demand. The production and emissions of N₂O are closely linked to the efficiency of nitrogen (N) transfer between the major components of a livestock system, that is, animal, manure, soil and crop.

Financial incentives have become a core component of private lands conservation programmes because of their ability to motivate stewardship behaviour. Concern exists about the durability of stewardship behaviours after payments end. Payments for performance may impact farmers' current and future engagement with an incentive programme to protect an at-risk ground-nesting grassland bird. Farmer motivations for participating in the programme, as well as their intention to continue the programme if the financial incentive no longer existed, were quantified.

Faced with the low success rates of protected areas in conserving natural forests and supporting rural development, the Malagasy government recently chose to transfer forest resource management to local communities. Feedback about the implementation of this new policy suggests that agriculture continues to drive deforestation. This article explores farmers' household livelihood strategies and land use changes in response to changing forest access rules arising from community-based land management.

Pasture degradation is one of the major environmental and economic problems of Brazilian livestock production. Based on the estimates of soil loss in 140,297 km² pasturelands of Goiás State and the Federal District, the effects of land use and management and conservation practices on soil erosion by water were evaluated. Soil loss was estimated with the empirical revised universal soil loss equation model under four scenarios of land use and management of pastures and the implementation of terraces. The effects of converting hilly areas into permanently preserved areas were also evaluated.

One of the recurrent shortcomings of water policy in France is the control of diffuse agricultural pollution. Numerous lacunae and incoherencies in the French Rural, Public Health, and Environmental Codes have hindered the effective implementation of efficient protection measures. In this paper, we underline the extent to which these incoherencies have hampered the emergence of cooperative agreements (CAs) between farmers and drinking water service providers.

Farm typologies are a useful tool to assist in unpacking and understanding the wide diversity among smallholder farms to improve targeting of crop production intensification strategies. Sustainable crop production intensification will require the development of an array of nutrient management strategies tailored to farm-specific conditions, rather than blanket recommendations across diverse farms.

Legislative changes during the 1960s–1970s granted user rights over wildlife to landowners in southern Africa, resulting in a shift from livestock farming to wildlife-based land uses. Few comprehensive assessments of such land uses on private land in southern Africa have been conducted and the associated benefits are not always acknowledged by politicians. Nonetheless, wildlife-based land uses are growing in prevalence on private land. In Namibia wildlife-based land use occurs over c. 287,000 km².

Declining crop and livestock production due to a degrading land resource base and changing climate among other biophysical and socio-economic constraints, is increasingly forcing rural households in Zimbabwe and other parts of Southern Africa to rely on common natural resource pools (CNRPs) to supplement their household food and income.

Engagement with farmers and landowners is often undertaken by the research community to obtain information relating to typical land, livestock and enterprise management and generally centres on responses to questionnaire surveys. Farmers and land managers are constituted as expert observers of ground-level processes and provide diverse information on farming practices, enterprise economics and underpinning attitudes towards risk.