CONTEXT: The role of agricultural landscapes in biodiversity conservation is an emerging topic in a world experiencing a worrying decrease of species richness. Farm systems may either decrease or increase biological diversity, depending on land-use intensities and management. OBJECTIVES: We present an intermediate disturbance-complexity model (IDC) of cultural landscapes aimed at assessing how different levels of anthropogenic disturbance on ecosystems affect the capacity to host biodiversity depending on the land matrix heterogeneity.

Shifting cultivation, locally known as jhum, is the predominant agricultural practice for most communities inhabiting the uplands of north-east India. The negative impacts of the practice on forest and biological resources, soil erosion and land degradation have been a serious concern for several decades now to administrators and planners as well as to the academic community. In the current context, the practice has undergone drastic changes and has become increasingly unviable, gradually leading to the marginalization of farmers practising it.

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of gender on the farm income of maize farmers in the study area. Primary data obtained using structured questionnaire were employed in the study and the data were collected from a sample size of 100 maize farmers comprising of 70 males and 30 females.

Social learning plays key roles in sustainable natural resource management; however, studies on its role show mixed results. Even though most current studies highlight positive outcomes, there are also negative effects of social learning with respect to natural resource management. This paper explores the influence of social learning outcomes on the adoption of soil conservation practices in Amba Zuria, Ethiopia. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, group discussions and in workshops.

Critics of modern agriculture decry the dominance of monocultural landscapes and look to multifunctionality as a desirable alternative that facilitates the production of public goods. In this study, we explored opportunities for multifunctional Midwestern agriculture through participatory research led by farmers, landowners, and other local actors. We suggest that agriculture typically fosters some degree of multifunctionality that arises from the divergent intentions of actors.

In this article, we analyze the impact of land fragmentation, farm size, land ownership and crop diversity on farm profit and efficiency of 90 groundwater irrigated farms in the hard rock areas of South India. As we hypothesize that these variables may impact both, farm profit and efficiency in alternative ways, we develop four different stochastic frontier and inefficiency effect models by shifting some of these variables from the inefficiency model into the profit function.

Agricultural crops and pasturelands cover 24–38% of the global land area, and thus the ecological services that agricultural systems provide are of utmost societal importance. An important determinant of ecosystem services provision from European farmland is the amount and spatial arrangement of trees, shrubs and woodlands that are integrated into the respective land-use systems.

The common use of pesticide is a major challenge in trying to accomplish sustainable agriculture. Farming systems based on integrated pest management (IPM) technologies can reduce the use of pesticides to a great extent without causing harm to the yield. Therefore, Bangladesh, like many developing countries, launched IPM technologies to reduce the adverse effects of pesticides in social, economic and environmental aspects. This study made an attempt to analyze the level of IPM adoption and the intensity of IPM practices by vegetable farmers of Narsingdi district, Bangladesh.

Substantial differences in the size of landholdings among cocoa farmers in the Western Region – the last cocoa “frontier” in Ghana – are primarily a result of inheritance practices and the purchase of vast tracts of land by migrants in the initial period of the cocoa boom. Individual accumulation of land over the last decade has mainly taken place via inheritance (among indigenous farmers) without takeovers of land and dispossession of small-scale farmers outside the extended family. Land accumulation among migrant farmers is rare beyond the initial acquisition.