Local communities often have substantial knowledge related to trends in soil quality and the associated limiting factors. Despite this, soil quality (SQ) degradation is a critical problem in Ethiopia and there is little or insufficient scientific information documenting local community experience in assessing SQ. This paper presents experiences of local communities in diagnosis of SQ and assesses the contribution of local knowledge as a strategy for sustainable development decision making within the Mai-Negus catchment of northern Ethiopia.

Achieving regional and national goals of renewable energy production will depend on sufficient supply of biomass from private forests, the majority of which are controlled by non-industrial private forest landowners (NIPF). Considering the diversity in management objectives and changing demographic dynamics in this ownership group, it is important to understand the characteristics of landowners that may supply woody biomass. This study developed linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and classification tree (CT) models to examine the characteristics and motivation of such NIPF landowners.

We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the conditions under which a farmer facing production uncertainty (due to a possible water shortage) and incomplete information will adopt a more efficient irrigation technology. A reduced form of this model is empirically estimated using a sample of 265 farms located in Crete, Greece. The empirical results suggest that farmers choose to adopt the new technology in order to hedge against production risk.

This paper analyses the shifting role of South African farmers, agribusiness and capital elsewhere in the Southern African region and the rest of the continent. It explores recent trends in this expansion, and investigates the interests and agendas shaping such deals, and the ideologies and discourses of legitimation employed in favour of them. While for the past two decades small numbers of South African farmers have moved to Mozambique, Zambia and several other countries, this trend seems to be undergoing both a quantitative and a qualitative shift.

Making the assumption that property rights might determine whether farmers adopt particular strategies, this study aims at modelling farmers’ decisions to adapt to climate change by focusing on their property rights – declined as institutional arrangements on land and rights on land – as well as their socio-economic and demographic characteristics. The case study took place in northern Benin (West Africa). In this zone, 308 farmers producing maize and adapting to climate change were randomly sampled.

Efforts to define and quantify soil quality are not new, but establishing consensus about a set of standardized indicators remains difficult. Also, the view of land managers is usually not taken into account when evaluating various sets of indicators. Our objective was to compare, in functional terms, soil quality assessments based on 29 indicators, a subset with 8 of those indicators, and 4 indicators selected independently by farmers, based on their perceptions of soil quality.

The environmental consequences of agriculture are of growing concern. One example of these consequences is the effect of agricultural pollutants on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), a world heritage-listed ecosystem lying off the tropical north-eastern coast of Australia. Pollutants from agricultural lands (fine sediments and attached nitrogen (N) mainly from grazing lands, and dissolved N and pesticides mainly from cropping) in catchments draining into the GBR lagoon threaten the health and resilience of this ecosystem.

In this paper, the role of subsurface drainage in irrigated agriculture in semi-arid and arid regions is discussed based on experiences obtained in Egypt, India and Pakistan. Agriculture in these countries is predominantly practiced by small, marginal farmers with landholdings of often less than one hectare. In general, they do not have the means to pay for the investments in irrigation and drainage themselves. Consequently, most irrigation and drainage projects are funded by the (local) governments.

In China, rural land is collectively owned at the village level. Village officials usually have the power to reallocate land property across families on an ongoing basis due to demographic changes in the village. Realizing that frequent land reallocation and abusive land requisition will undermine economic productivity as well as social stability, the “Rural Land Contract Law” passed in 2002 explicitly reads that farmland tenure security must be maintained for at least 30 years since the last nationwide reallocation in 1998.

In Ethiopia, farmers’ adoption and continued use of introduced land management technologies have not been widespread to reduce soil erosion and soil fertility depletion to an acceptable level. An important set of factors in farmers’ use of improved agricultural technologies is generally known to be their possession of livelihood assets. This study examines the influence of ownership of livelihood assets in farmers’ decisions to use cattle manure as land improvement technology, which is currently being promoted by Ethiopia’s agricultural extension system.

This article examines the process of agroecological research on beekeeping systems, developed jointly by the Temperate Agriculture Program of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company (EMBRAPA), and the Institute of Sociology and Peasant Studies (ISEC), of the University of Córdoba. The investigation was carried out on different beekeeping experiences in southern Brazil: peasant family farms, settlements of agrarian reform, and Afro-descent quilombola and Guarani indigenous villages.

The weedy Setaria species (giant, green, yellow, knotroot, and bristly foxtail) compose one of the worst weed groups interfering with world agriculture and in other disturbed and managed habitats. These species, together with their crop counterparts (foxtail millet, korali), form the foxtail species-group (spp.-gp). Five successive waves of Setaria spp. invasion from preagricultural times to the present have resulted in widespread infestation of the disturbed, arable, temperate regions of the earth. These invasions have resulted in considerable economic and environmental costs.