This review has been necessary to bring together and interpret much of the diverse literature relating to the key areas of environmental impact associated with agriculture. The main environmental impacts of agriculture in the United Kingdom are associated with pesticides, nitrogen compounds, farm livestock wastes and soil erosion. Impacts on fauna and flora, water bodies and humans, as well as ...

Conventional agriculture has improved in crop yield but at large costs to the environment, particularly off-site pollution from mineral N fertilizers. In response to environmental concerns, organic agriculture has become an increasingly popular option. One component of organic agriculture that remains in question is whether it can reduce agricultural N losses to groundwater and the atmosphere r...

The industrial agriculture system consumes fossil fuel, water, and topsoil at unsustainable rates. It contributes to numerous forms of environmental degradation, including air and water pollution, soil depletion, diminishing biodiversity, and fish die-offs. Meat production contributes disproportionately to these problems, in part because feeding grain to livestock to produce meat--instead of fe...

Adaptation in agriculture to climate change is important for impact and vulnerability assessment and for the development of climate change policy. A wide variety of adaptation options has been proposed as having the potential to reduce vulnerability of agricultural systems to risks related to climate change, often in an ad hoc fashion. This paper develops a typology of adaptation to systematica...

Sustainable food production system is the key to sustainable development especially for hill communities where agriculture is the mainstay of economy. History shows that human societies that can protect their livelihood-based natural resources are able to sustain themselves. So even today we find several indigenous communities obtaining sustained and adequate income/returns from their agricultu...

Among the myriad complications involved in the current food crisis, the relationship between agriculture and the rest of nature is one of the most important yet remains only incompletely analyzed. Particularly in tropical areas, agriculture is frequently seen as the antithesis of the natural world, where the problem is framed as one of minimizing land devoted to agriculture so as to devote more...

Ochratoxin A is a mycotoxin produced mainly by Penicillium verrucosum and Aspergillus ochraceus. Although typically considered a cereal contaminant, it has also been detected in dried fruit, nuts, meat and derivatives. To estimate the quantity of ochratoxin A that might be ingested by Italian consumers from these foods, 211 cereal derivatives (flours and bakery products) were analysed by high-p...

With intensifying demands for food and biofuels, a critical threat to biodiversity is agricultural expansion into native tropical ecosystems. Tropical agriculture, particularly intensive agriculture, often supports few native organisms, and consequently has been largely overlooked in conservation planning; yet, recent work in the Neotropics demonstrates that tropical agriculture with certain fe...