Soil quality (SQ) assessment from farmers' point of view can be used as a primary indicator for planning sustainable agriculture. Despite this fact, limited information is documented with regard to SQ indicators, for example weed species, crop types and management practices from farmers' knowledge perspectives. The aims of this study are to analyse factors that determine farmers' knowledge of SQ, identify SQ indicators of weed species and crop types across different SQ status and assess soil‐and‐crop management practices that maintain SQ in the Mai‐Negus catchment, northern Ethiopia.

In the Mekong Delta, alluvial clay soils have been used intensively over many generations for rice monoculture. Currently, farmers are confronted by problems of declining land productivity. Rotations comprising rice and upland crops can increase soil quality, but appropriate cropping systems for paddy soils have received relatively little attention. We therefore established a multiyear field experiment to evaluate the long‐term effects of cropping systems with different rotations on soil chemical quality.

Desertification is the most disturbing and detrimental cause of rural vulnerability in Cape Verde, affecting families' material and environmental resources. Combating desertification in Cape Verde is complex because it involves addressing a mixture of endogenous (manual agriculture, fuel wood and fodder extraction, land tenure and steep slopes) and exogenous drivers (high rainfall variability, climate change, prolonged drought or heavy rainfall).

Over the past two decades, China has undertaken unprecedented forest programs in an effort to restore damaged ecosystems and increasing farmers’ income. Using survey results of 2070 rural households in 15 counties of six provinces, we estimate the effects of China's Priority Forest Programs (PFPs) on rural households’ income mobility. The effects of the area enrolled in the PFPs on rural households are mixed.

Several influential reports have suggested that one of the most appropriate responses to expected food shortages and ongoing environmental degradation is sustainable intensification, i.e. the increase of food production with at worst no increase in environmental harm, and ideally environmental benefit. Here we sought evidence of sustainable intensification among British farmers by selecting innovative arable, dairy, mixed and upland farms and analysing their own data on yields, inputs and land use and management for 2006 and 2011.

This project was initiated to promote conservation agriculture (CA) in Tanzania so as to improve the food security and rural livelihood of small- and medium-scale farmers through the scaling-up of CA as a sustainable land management (SLM) tool as well as increasing the numbers of SLM-CA farmer field schools (FFS) in communities. The project had two phases from 2004 to 2010. It was funded by a Government of Germany trust fund and implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Ministry of Agriculture in Tanzania.

The vicious poverty–environmental spiral commonly exists due to the interconnectedness of the socioeconomic aspects of farmers and land degradation. The socioeconomic situation of farmers affects their capabilities to implement environmentally viable soil and water conservation measures. These situations include farm practices and attitudes toward rational use of resources. An observational study was conducted to have an insight of the perception of farmers about the danger of gully erosion and their willingness to adopt new improved soil and water conservation measures.

A cross-sectional serological study was carried out to screen the sheep and goat population of Thessaly, Greece for evidence of infection with Toxoplasma, Toxocara, Leishmania, and Echinococcus and to determine the risk factors related to herd characteristics, herd management practices, farmer status, and the bioclimatic variables associated with these zoonotic parasitic infections. A total of 540 sheep and goat serum samples were examined. The seroprevalence of infection in all examined animals was 24.5% for Toxoplasma, 32% for Toxocara, 0% for Leishmania and 85.9% for Echinococcus.

Integrated watershed management has been promoted as a suitable strategy for improving productivity and sustainable intensification of agriculture in rainfed drought-prone regions. The paper examines the socioeconomic and biophysical factors influencing farmers' soil and water conservation investment decisions and the resulting economic incentives (productivity benefits) from watershed management interventions in the semi-arid tropics of India.

Although China still holds land in collective and state ownership, land use rights have been largely privatized. While transactions for forestland use rights have taken place for more than two decades, few detailed investigations of the transactions have been conducted. This study investigates 222 households in eight villages of Linan and Anji counties located within Zhejiang Province, and reports details of the transactions, their scope and motivation, and the characteristics of households participating in the market for forestland use rights.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a major attribute of soil quality that responds to land management activities which is also important in the regulation of global carbon (C) cycling. This study evaluated bulk soil C and nitrogen (N) contents and C and N dynamics in three soil organic matter (SOM) fractions separated by density. The study was based on three tillage systems on farmer managed experiments (conventional tillage (CT), ripping (RP), direct seeding (DS)) and adjacent natural forest (NF) in Haplic Arenosols (sandy) and Rhodic Ferralsols (clayey) of Zimbabwe.