agriculture land Articles

A number of policy tools are used to reduce soil erosion from agricultural lands in the USA, including education and technical assistance, financial assistance, land retirement, and conservation compliance requirements. Education and technical assistance by public and private sources can be effective in promoting the adoption of conservation tillage by farmers for whom that practice will be ...

Jan. 25, 2004

By Inderscience Publishers

The Riverina region in south-western New South Wales, Australia, is a discrete geographical area having unique patterns of soils and vegetation. During 170 years, it has been used productively for sheep and cattle grazing, but with significant detrimental impact on the natural systems. This article reviews the historical impact and suggests means of rehabilitating the landscape for the purposes ...

Jan. 5, 2011

By Inderscience Publishers

Pesticides. Sprayed across vast expanses of farm land, they have become a ubiquitous part of industrial agriculture. But there may actually be more consequences to their use than we had previously predicted. A recent study headed by Chensheng Lu at Harvard University connects the rising phenomena of beehive abandonment, known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), to the use of a family of pesticides ...

Sep. 30, 2012

By Worldwatch Institute

The paper develops a system of local Material Flow Analysis that links material flows to issues of land use transition, globalisation and food security. This system (rMFA) is then applied to villages in Vietnam, the Philippines and Laos. The rMFA shows that these villages greatly differ in terms of these indicators, and with that, in terms of risks and future-oriented policies, issues that remain ...

Oct. 24, 2005

By Inderscience Publishers

US ethanol production should exceed 12 billion gallons by 2010, and EISA 2007 mandates 36 billion gallons by 2022, diverting one-third of corn to ethanol and 13% of soybean production to biodiesel. Increased demand will ricochet through other agricultural sectors and alter production patterns and land use in the Corn Belt. This paper discusses effects of biofuel expansion on land and water ...

Sep. 7, 2009

By Inderscience Publishers

Rice is the second largest cereal crop grown worldwide. One-half of the world population and virtually all of East and Southeast Asia is wholly dependent upon rice. Rice production in the Mediterranean regions dates back to the seventh century. This crop was first introduced into Egypt and gradually spread, towards the fifteenth century, to most countries of the Mediterranean basin. Rice is at ...

Jan. 24, 2006

By Springer

We apply stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) techniques to a provincial level data set to measure technical and water efficiency in China's agricultural production from 1999 to 2002. The determinants of the efficiencies are identified together with the physical determinant structure of the irrigation factor, which refers to the water use per irrigated land area. The study yields the following ...

Jan. 23, 2005

By Inderscience Publishers

A hedonic approach is used to study farmland prices in Aragon (Spain). Data over 450 transactions in 33 shires, in 2001 and 2002 are analysed. The marginal values for irrigated vs. non-irrigated land, the productive orientation and the differentiation of production through a Designation of Origin (D.O.) are used as explanatory variables. Socio-economic variables are also included. A Box-Cox ...

Jan. 24, 2007

By Inderscience Publishers

Recent distressing trends in climate change, population explosion and deforestation have inspired this paper, which completes the existing literature by providing empirical justification to hypothetical initiatives on the impact of population growth on forest sustainability in Africa. Using three instruments of forest exploitation, the study shows how rural, agricultural and national population ...

Nov. 15, 2012

By Inderscience Publishers

Soil is a finite resource, meaning its loss and degradation is not recoverable within a human lifespan. As a core component of land resources, agricultural development and ecological sustainability, it is the basis for food, feed, fuel and fibre production and for many critical ecosystem services. It is therefore a highly valuable natural resource, yet it is often overlooked. The natural area of ...

Mar. 2, 2015

By Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

While global food availability increased by 27% per person over the past four decades, it decreased by 12% in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). This paper explores the role of technology use on agricultural development to understand the ever widening gap of SSA with other global regions. It looks into land (i.e., yield) and labour productivity, the relation between technology use and yield stability and, ...

Sep. 16, 2008

By Inderscience Publishers

There have been three periods of permanent human occupation of the Upper Trinity River basin. For most of the last 11,000 years only Native Americans have lived here. These first citizens hunted, fished and lived with nature … they made no substantive changes to the land or water resources … and they thought it would always be that way.The colonists began arriving in the mid-1800’s. They soon ...

Oct. 20, 2006

By Water Environment Federation (WEF)

The Biosphere Reserve Lower Saxonian Elbe Valley (Biosphärenreservat Niedersächsische Elbtalaue), which was created on the basis of an unanimous decision by the Lower Saxonian State Parliament in 2002, represents Lower Saxony’s contribution to the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve ‘Flusslandschaft Elbe’ (Elbe River Landscape). It stretches for about 100 kilometres south-east of ...

Sep. 9, 2011

By IWA Publishing

Composting of municipal solid waste is an emerging area in India with great prospects as well as constraints. These developments can be examined from the waste management, agricultural and climate change scenario. The technology is simple and affordable, the product is beneficial for soil and significant saving of land (required for land-filling) is achieved. However, public-private partnership ...

Sep. 18, 2007

By Inderscience Publishers

There is scope internationally to utilise surplus and degraded agricultural land for biomass crops that might also be environmentally beneficial. For example, dryland salinity in southern Australian could be ameliorated using profitable woody biomass crops. A model was developed to predict biomass production from such woody crops. At a biomass price of A$35/t (green) and a water use efficiency of ...

May 10, 2007

By Inderscience Publishers

Pluriactivity is the usual survival strategy adopted by smallholders. This strategy is effective when it is accompanied by considerable gender role flexibility that allows the combination of men's and women's farm work and farm management contributions. Interviews with 296 smallholders in rural Greece showed that the most adaptive survival strategy is adopted when pluriactive male partners ...

Jan. 29, 2004

By Inderscience Publishers

This paper focuses on the economic dimension of rural transformation (or structural transformation) in Turkey. It investigates the development of labour demand and supply in rural areas over the past two decades. For that purpose, three longitudinal case studies were conducted in three different regions of Turkey. This paper concludes that the lack of substantial labour transfer from agricultural ...

May 2, 2007

By Inderscience Publishers

Environmental degradation is very closely associated with economic growth, which leads to the popular concept of sustainable development. The idea of sustainable development also has a component of damage to the environment, though it is minimum. However, there is one thing that has the potential of promoting development along with poverty reduction with the true spirit of the idea of ...

Jan. 1, 2015

By Inderscience Publishers

This paper proposes an economic growth model to provide some insights into issues related to sustainable economy with capital and resource dynamics. The model combines the main economic mechanisms in the Solow growth model, the Ricardian two–sector economic model, and the logistic model in resource economics in a compact framework. We simulate the model, identifying the existence of two steady ...

Jun. 23, 2013

By Inderscience Publishers

We depict recent agricultural nitrogen input and future loads to be expected in 2021 in the German Baltic Sea catchment to assess the feasibility of reaching water quality targets defined by the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD). We calculate recent and future nitrogen balances from agriculture by applying an interdisciplinary modelling system, also considering the effects of the ...

Jun. 13, 2016

By IWA Publishing