Changing dietary preferences and population growth in South Asia have resulted in increasing demand for wheat and maize, along side high and sustained demand for rice. In the highly productive northwestern Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia, farmers utilize groundwater irrigation to assure that at least two of these crops are sequenced on the same field within the same year. Such double croppin...

“The debate on sustainable production often ends in discussions on the feasibility of farreaching changes in relation to the competitiveness of companies. Industry itself and policy-makers tend to back away from engaging in profound processes of industrial transformation” (Green, quotation frames the problem of moving towards sustainable production while dividing the issue into two separate yet...

Meeting crop nitrogen (N) demand while minimizing N losses to the environment has proven difficult despite significant field research and modeling efforts. To improve N management, several real-time N management tools have been developed with a primary focus on enhancing crop production. However, no coordinated effort exists to simultaneously address sustainability concerns related to N losses ...

Introduction This chapter addresses the question “Can smallholder livestock production systems in developing countries be transformed to take advantage of the increasing demand for meat?”, a question that has been posed by many authors (for example, Tarawali et al. 2011). On the basis of a case study that followed smallholder cattle development in Ea Kar, a district in the central highlands of ...

The intensification of beef cattle production in dryland areas of East Indonesia has the potential to substantially raise the incomes of smallholder farmers that dominate the sector. In this study we assess the potential for intensifying beef production on Sumbawa Island, by introducing a household feedlot production system (2-20 animals) based on the Leucaena leucocephala (leucanea) tree legum...

We argue that reading the local agricultural landscape is a prerequisite to understanding the plausible local impacts of external drivers for change, such as the introduction of new crops and technologies. Initially driven by a desire to understand the potential for small-scale farmers to produce jatropha biodiesel in a sustainable way, we started to examine how farmers related to trees in diff...

Concerns regarding the depletion of the world's reserves of oil and global climate change have promoted an intensification of research and development toward the production of biofuels and other alternative sources of energy during the last years. There is currently much interest in developing the technology for third-generation biofuels from microalgal biomass mainly because of its potential f...

Landscape-scale intensification of individual crops and pesticide use that is associated with this intensification is an emerging, environmental problem that is expected to have unequal effects on pests with different lifecycles, host ranges, and dispersal abilities. We investigate if intensification of a single crop in an agroecosystem has a direct effect on insecticide resistance in a special...