Exploring and Optimizing Agricultural Landscapes
Exploring and Optimizing Agricultural Landscapes

Author: Lothar Mueller

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-14

Total Pages: 735

ISBN-13: 3030674487

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The book informs about agricultural landscapes, their features, functions and regulatory mechanisms. It characterizes agricultural production systems, trends of their development, and their impacts on the landscape. Agricultural landscapes are multifunctional systems, coupled with all nexus problems of the 21th century. This has led to serious discrepancies between agriculture and environment, and between urban and rural population. The mission, key topics and methods of research in order to understanding, monitoring and controlling processes in rural landscapes is being explained. Studies of international expert teams, many of them from Russia, demonstrate approaches towards both improving agricultural productivity and sustainability, and enhancing ecosystem services of agricultural landscapes. Scientists of different disciplines, decision makers, farmers and further informed people dealing with the evolvement of thriving rural landscapes are the primary audience of this book.

Exploring Agrodiversity
Exploring Agrodiversity

Author: H. C. Brookfield

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 023110233X

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Small farmers are often viewed as engaging in wasteful practices that wreak ecological havoc. Exploring Agrodiversity sets the record straight: Small farmers are in fact ingenious and inventive and engage in a diverse range of land-management strategies, many of them resourcefully geared toward conserving resources, especially soil. Using case studies from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, this book provides in-depth analysis of agricultural diversity and explores its history.

Explaining and Exploring Diversity in Agricultural Technology
Explaining and Exploring Diversity in Agricultural Technology

Author: Annelou van Gijn

Publisher: Oxbow Books

Published: 2014-08-29

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1782970231

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This volume is the outcome of collaborative European research among archaeologists, archaeobotanists, ethnographers, historians and agronomists, and frequently uses experiments in archaeology. It aims to establish new common ground for integrating different approaches and for viewing agriculture from the standpoint of the human actors involved. Each chapter provides an interdisciplinary overview of the skills used and the social context of the pursuit of agriculture, highlighting examples of tools, technologies and processes from land clearance to cereal processing and food preparation. This is the second of three volumes in the EARTH monograph series, The dynamics of non-industrial agriculture: 8,000 years of resilience and innovation , which shows the great variety of agricultural practices in human terms, in their social, political, cultural and legal contexts.

An Exploration of the Contingent Necessities of Agricultural Biotechnology
An Exploration of the Contingent Necessities of Agricultural Biotechnology

Author: Dona Barirani

Publisher: Herbert Utz Verlag

Published: 2015-09-22

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 3831644438

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More than any other technology it is biotechnology that intervenes deeply in the original substance of life, the DNA. Particularly agricultural biotechnology, including its production of gene-food, plays a fundamental role for any kind of life and, therefore, for human societies. In this context, the interrelating dimensions of technology, economy, and politics have to be considered for doing justice to the high complexity of this research field. Pursuing this aim, this work elaborates the contingent necessities of agricultural biotechnology. At different levels of abstraction and complexity, occurrences are decoded as interplays of various different factors while reductionism and mono-causal explanations are fundamentally denied. This book is a comprehensive study of modern agricultural biotechnology that links current developments to relevant trajectories of past times. The author addresses political scientists, decision-makers and also natural scientists that are engaged in this field.

Exploring the Global Competitiveness of Agri-Food Sectors and Serbia's Dominant Presence: Emerging Research and Opportunities
Exploring the Global Competitiveness of Agri-Food Sectors and Serbia's Dominant Presence: Emerging Research and Opportunities

Author: Ignjatijevi?, Svetlana

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2017-08-11

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 152252763X

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The agricultural and food sectors have developed into a prominent industry, impacting economic markets on an international scale. In certain regions, there is a significant potential for creating increased competitive advantage in these business areas. Exploring the Global Competitiveness of Agri-Food Sectors and Serbia's Dominant Presence: Emerging Research and Opportunities includes academic coverage and perspectives on enhancing the competitiveness of the Serbian food industry in the global marketplace. Highlighting pertinent topics such as exports, international trade, and manufacturing considerations, this book is an ideal resource for academics, researchers, graduate students, and professionals actively involved in the agri-food industry.

Agricultural development: New perspectives in a changing world
Agricultural development: New perspectives in a changing world

Author: Otsuka, Keijiro, ed.

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 798

ISBN-13: 0896293831

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Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World is the first comprehensive exploration of key emerging issues facing developing-country agriculture today, from rapid urbanization to rural transformation to climate change. In this four-part volume, top experts offer the latest research in the field of agricultural development. Using new lenses to examine today’s biggest challenges, contributors address topics such as nutrition and health, gender and household decision-making, agrifood value chains, natural resource management, and political economy. The book also covers most developing regions, providing a critical global perspective at a time when many pressing challenges extend beyond national borders. Tying all this together, Agricultural Development explores policy options and strategies for developing sustainable agriculture and reducing food insecurity and malnutrition. The changing global landscape combined with new and better data, technologies, and understanding means that agriculture can and must contribute to a wider range of development outcomes than ever before, including reducing poverty, ensuring adequate nutrition, creating strong food value chains, improving environmental sustainability, and promoting gender equity and equality. Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World, with its unprecedented breadth and scope, will be an indispensable resource for the next generation of policymakers, researchers, and students dedicated to improving agriculture for global wellbeing.

Cultivating Knowledge
Cultivating Knowledge

Author: Andrew Flachs

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0816539634

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A single seed is more than just the promise of a plant. In rural south India, seeds represent diverging paths toward a sustainable livelihood. Development programs and global agribusiness promote genetically modified seeds and organic certification as a path toward more sustainable cotton production, but these solutions mask a complex web of economic, social, political, and ecological issues that may have consequences as dire as death. In Cultivating Knowledge anthropologist Andrew Flachs shows how rural farmers come to plant genetically modified or certified organic cotton, sometimes during moments of agrarian crisis. Interweaving ethnographic detail, discussions of ecological knowledge, and deep history, Flachs uncovers the unintended consequences of new technologies, which offer great benefits to some—but at others’ expense. Flachs shows that farmers do not make simple cost-benefit analyses when evaluating new technologies and options. Their evaluation of development is a complex and shifting calculation of social meaning, performance, economics, and personal aspiration. Only by understanding this complicated nexus can we begin to understand sustainable agriculture. By comparing the experiences of farmers engaged with these mutually exclusive visions for the future of agriculture, Cultivating Knowledge investigates the human responses to global agrarian change. It illuminates the local impact of global changes: the slow, persistent dangers of pesticides, inequalities in rural life, the aspirations of people who grow fibers sent around the world, the place of ecological knowledge in modern agriculture, and even the complex threat of suicide. It all begins with a seed.