How we eat has a major impact on our individual health status, our quality of life and our well-being. Many of the foods we eat have a major social, environmental, climate and animal welfare footprint. This expertise defines policies to promote sustainability in food consumption as policies that integrate all four target dimensions: human health, social aspects, the natural environment (including climate) and animal welfare. Achieving greater sustainability in food consumption poses great challenges.
Facing the challenges of the 21st century, into the agricultural sector have been designing strategies focused on the management of ecosystem resources, risk management associated with crops and the promotion of sustainable growth of agricultural communities. These strategies have been configured considering functional and competitive levels for open agricultural production systems, and usually based on low-cost technologies such that Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Internet of Things (IoT), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), Cloud Computing, and Computational Algorithms.
Social learning processes can be the basis of a method of agricultural innovation that involves expert and empirical knowledge. In this sense, the objective of this study was to determine the effectiveness and sustainability of an innovation process, understood as social learning, in a group of small farmers in the southern highlands of Peru. Innovative proposals and its permanence three years after the process finished were evaluated. It was observed that innovation processes generated are maintained over time; however, new innovations are not subsequently generated
Being the ultimate beneficiary of ecosystem services provided by on-farm agricultural biodiversity, the participation of farmers in its sustainable utilization and conservation is crucial. How much aware they are with the significance and conservation of agricultural biodiversity in order to improve their crop yield remains unclear, especially from the developing courtiers. Pollination is one of such ecosystem services, enormously contributed by the wild bees.
The main objective of this study was to investigate and analyse the farmers’ perceptions on criteria and indicators for sustainable management of indigenous agroforestry systems in Uttarakhand state of India. The present study was conducted to document the traditional knowledge and considered five broad categories including agriculture management, livestock management, forest sustainability, social benefits, and policy inputs along with 16 criteria and 34 indicators were identified.
Many indigenous vegetables are generally underutilized across different cultures, but they remain alternatives to exotic vegetables that often are expensive. This study investigated effects of participation in indigenous vegetable production on livelihood of farmers. Multistaged sampling was used to collect data from 222 vegetable farmers sampled from using a semi-structured questionnaire. Principal component analysis and endogenous switching regression (ESR) were employed for analysis
Mountain agricultural systems (MASs) are multifunctional and multidimensional sociocultural systems. They are constantly influenced by many factors whose intensity and impacts are unpredictable. The recent Hindu Kush–Himalayan Assessment Report highlighted the need to integrate mountain perspectives into governance decisions on sustaining resources in the Hindu Kush–Himalayan region, emphasizing the importance of sustainable MASs.
This paper considers how farmers engage with, utilise and share knowledge through a focus on the Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) initiative in the UK. In exploring the importance of social contexts and social relations to these practices, the paper brings together understandings of knowledge with those from the literature on good farming to consider how different knowledges gain credibility, salience and legitimacy in different contexts.
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is considered as an ecological conservation technology for crop pests' management; however, the technology adoption is intensely affected by surrounding socio-psychological environment, which is poorly studied, particularly in developing nations. The present study therefore aimed at addressing this gap through application of an extended form of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in order to examine the determinants of Iranian farmers' ecological conservation behavior regarding the use of IPM practices.
This paper explores possible pathways for different types of farmers, considering where they might be in the future, beyond 2030 and the era of the SDGs. It outlines some of the necessary interventions, risks and trade-offs associated with these different pathways, for farmers operating in a variety of agricultural systems globally, including cropping, livestock and tree (silvopasture) systems. It also considers the impacts of different disruption scenarios that could radically alter anticipated pathways and offers a range of possible interventions.