We hypothesize that biological diversification across ecological, spatial, and temporal scales maintains and regenerates the ecosystem services that provide critical inputs—such as maintenance of soil quality, nitrogen fixation, pollination, and pest control—to agriculture. Agrobiodiversity is sustained by diversified farming practices and it also supplies multiple ecosystem services to agricul...

The sustainability of breeding activities in 15 pig farming systems in five European countries was evaluated. One conventional and two differentiated systems per country were studied. The Conventional systems were the standard systems in their countries. The differentiated systems were of three categories: Adapted Conventional with focus on animal welfare, meat quality or environment (five syst...

This paper focuses on the role of scavenging poultry in integrated farming systems and is mainly based on previous studies and past research and development attempts to improve scavenging poultry in Ethiopia. Village poultry production is an integral part of a balanced farming system and has a unique position in the rural household economy, supplying high quality protein to the family. In this ...

Sustainability is de®ned as the ability of a system to `continue'. In view of this de®nition, several aspects of the crop protection activity in organic farming are reviewed according to their ability to `continue'. As no absolute measure of sustainability is available, this analysis takes the form of a comparison between organic and conventional crop protection methods. Two elements of crop pr...

The present practice of traditional slash-and-burn agriculture (locally called jhum kheti) by the ethnic Noctes in Tirap district of Arunachal Pradesh, India is a part of history of rural landscapes. Even today, the local jhumias totally depends on this traditional farming system for their livelihood. Nonetheless, it is time and again considered as ‘traditional’ and firm in contrast to modern m...

The growth of organic farming practices in the last few decades is continuing to stimulate the international debate about this alternative food market. As a p art of a PhD project r esearch about embeddedness in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs), this paper focuses on the promotional aspects of organic farms websites from the Madrid region. As a theoretical tool, some knowledge categories drawn ...

Statistical entropy analysis (SEA) quantifies the dilution and concentration of conservative substances (e.g., heavy metals) in a system. In this paper, the SEA concept is extended (eSEA) to make it applicable to systems in which the chemical speciation is of particular importance. The eSEA is applied to a simplified region used for crop farming. The extent to which the region concentrates or d...