This paper summarizes the deliberations at a meeting convened by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held in Beijing in October 2015. Farm power and mechanization are agricultural production inputs that will be essential to raise the labor and land productivity required if Sustainable Development Goals 1 and 2 (ending poverty and hunger) are to be achieved.

The sustainability of society hinges on the future of agriculture. Though alternatives to unsustainable, high-input industrial agriculture are available, agricultural systems have been slow to transition to them. Much of the resistance to adopting alternative techniques stems from the perceived costs of alternative agriculture, mainly in terms of yields.

Food flow data provide unique insights into the debates surrounding the sustainability of land based production and consumption at multiple scales. Trade flows disguise the spatial correspondence of production and consumption and make their connection to land difficult. Two key components of this spatial disjuncture are land use displacement and economic regional decoupling. By displacing the environmental impact associated with food production from one region to another, environmental trajectories can falsely appear to be sustainable at a particular site or scale.

The paper presents selected problems of farm management in terms of fragmented agriculture. The problem of land fragmentation was exemplified by the three countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The main purpose of the study was to compare the effectiveness of selected indicators of agricultural production in the three selected countries. For the analysis, the data on the concentration indexes was selected: Lorenz concentration coefficient, the Gini index, and territorial concentration coefficient (Gini C and Stuck formula).

Fertile soils are an essential building block for human existence on Earth. The degradation of soils and land, in this regard, poses significant challenges for the well-being and food security of all the people around the world. Moreover, soils provide not only food, fiber, and many types of biomass we use, but also a wide

The paper investigates the conflicting findings in empirical studies linking land productivity to plot size, livestock ownership, investment in farm assets, and land improvement practices. The conflicting impacts found are partly as a result of different model specifications, the type of data used – panel or cross sectional data – and possibly due to imperfections in rural markets. We control for these problems using household and plot level panel data from rural farmers in Uganda. We find that ownership of cattle has a negative and significant impact on land productivity.

With an expected 9.5 billion people living on earth by 2050, population pressure, higher consumer expectations and climate change will tax and degrade our natural resource base, especially the LAND. With an increasing awareness of the potential of land to meet public and private development goals, land is being seen as an ever more attractive investment vehicle.

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development across the globe.

This paper establishes that the Caloric Suitability Index (CSI) dominates the commonly used measure of agricultural suitability in the examination of the effect of land productivity on comparative economic development. The analysis demonstrates that the agricultural suitability index does not capture the large variation in the potential caloric yield across equally suitable land, reflecting the fact that land suitable for agriculture is not necessarily suitable for the most caloric-intensive crops.

In line with the “Condition of organic farming in Poland. The report 2013- -2014”, issued by the Main Inspectorate of the Agricultural and Food Quality Inspection (www.ijhar-s.gov.pl), production solely under the organic system was carried out, at that time, by 67% and 60% of organic farms, respectively. The remaining share are entities producing under both organic and conventional methods. According to research, held under the Polish FADN, these farms are highly varied in organisational, production and economic terms.

Although there has been a considerable effort to reduce soil erosion and improve land productivity in Ethiopia, farmers’ investments in SWC remain limited. There is a long and rich tradition of empirical research that seeks to identify the determinants that affect farmers’ investments in SWC practices. Nevertheless, the results regarding these determinants have been inconsistent and scattered. Moreover, the impacts of different SWC practices have not been reviewed and synthesized.