The growing awareness of the negative impact of agriculture on the natural environment creates social expectation towards the reduction of this impact through the pro-environmental activities of farmers. Agri-environmental programmes are one of the key instruments of EU agricultural policy aimed at encouraging farmers to do so. Due to their voluntary nature and involvement of farmers in these activities, there has been a scientific discussion for a long time on the factors determining the participation of farmers in these programmes.

The Vietnamese government is currently attempting to upgrade rice value chains in the Mekong River Delta by encouraging (i) vertical coordination between exporters and farmers through contract farming, and (ii) horizontal coordination among farmers through the “small farmers, large field” program. Previous studies on the determinants of contract farming participation assume that firms offer only a single contract type, whereas in reality, farmers may face a continuum of exclusive contract options.

The lack of land ownership can discourage agricultural technology adoption, yet there is scarce evidence of the impact of land rental contracts on the adoption of improved crop varieties in developing countries. The current study investigates such impact using a nationally representative survey of Ethiopian maize farmers. In contrast to many previous studies, we show in a simple model that cash-renters are as likely to adopt improved maize varieties as owner-operators, while sharecroppers are more likely to adopt given that such varieties are profitable.

Over the past centuries, land systems in Italy experienced fundamental shifts, owing to the availability of new energy forms, population surges, and technological progress. The 20th century was characterized by massive productivity increases, accompanied by gradual land abandonment and the return of forest land. We here analyze 120 years of land system change in Italy, applying the human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) framework, a metric for socio-economic pressures on terrestrial ecosystems.

Conservation is a fundamentally spatial pursuit. Human–elephant conflict (HEC), in particular crop-raiding, is a significant and complex conservation problem wherever elephants and people occupy the same space. Conservationists and wildlife managers build electrified fences as a technical solution to this problem. Fences provide a spatial means of controlling human–elephant interactions by creating a place for elephants and a place for cultivation. They are often planned and designed based on the ecology of the target species.

Adoptions of improved technologies and production practices are important drivers of agricultural development in low-income countries like Nepal. Adopting a broad class of such technologies and practices is often critical for meeting the multifaceted goals of efficiency, profitability, environmental sustainability, and climate resilience.

Recent forecasts show a need to increase agricultural production globally by 60% from 2005 to 2050, in order to meet a rising demand from a growing population. This poses challenges for scientists and policy makers to formulate solutions on how to increase food production and simultaneously meet environmental targets such as the conservation and protection of water, the conservation of biodiversity, and the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

The number of young farmers has decreased over recent decades in several developed countries such as the United States and European countries. A recent strategy adopted by the European Union to address the resulting age imbalance is the Young Farmer Payment which provides an additional payment on top of the average basic payment introduced in the last Common Agricultural Policy reform. The objective of this study is to determine, by means of a behavioural approach, how this payment influenced the incentives of young farmers to stay in the farm.

A vast array of trends and innovations, such as drones and person-to-person trust solutions, have been proposed to revolutionize the task of recording land and property rights. There is, however, a gap in current research regarding how to approach systematically the future(s) of cadastral systems. This paper introduces socio-technical transitions theory and multi-level perspective (MLP) framework in particular as a way to structure potential pathways for cadastral systems.

Recent studies assessing agricultural policies, including the EU’s Agri-Environment Scheme, have shown that these have been successful in attaining some environmental goals. In Finland, however, the economic situation of farms has dramatically fallen and hence, the actions do not result in social acceptability. Sustainable intensification is a means to combine the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. Here we introduce a novel land use optimization and planning tool for the sustainable intensification of high-latitude agricultural systems.

Both research and policy recognize land systems as fundamental to human life and activities. However, these two perspectives approach land from different ends and it can be difficult to see how studied variables contribute to broader policy goals. In this paper, we argue that there is a need to better select variables to study land systems as social-ecological systems, and to align research more with those policy goals.

Cover crops are considered to be beneficial for multiple ecosystem services, and they have been widely promoted through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the EU and Farm Bill Conservation Title Programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), in the USA. However, it can be difficult to decide whether the beneficial effects of cover crops on some ecosystem services are likely to outweigh their harmful effects on other services, and thus to decide whether they should be promoted by agricultural policy in specific situations.