Attempts to increase food crop yields by intensifying agricultural systems using high inputs of nonrenewable resources and chemicals frequently lead to de-gradation of natural resources, whereas most technological innovations are not accessible for smallholders that represent the majority of farmers world wide. Alternatively, cocultures consisting of assemblages of plant and animal species can ...

Ensuring stable crop yields in an era where climate change threatens traditional agricultural practices through altered rainfall patterns and increased urban consumption has become a vital concern in global food security. Projected freshwater availability for irrigation indicates that between 20 and 60 Mha of irrigated cropland may have to be reverted to rainfed management [57]. Formerly irriga...

Several studies have shown that global crop production needs to double by 2050 to meet the projected demands from rising population, diet shifts, and increasing biofuels consumption. Boosting crop yields to meet these rising demands, rather than clearing more land for agriculture has been highlighted as a preferred solution to meet this goal. However, we first need to understand how crop yields...

Land-use change in the U.S. Great Plains since agricultural settlement in the second half of the nineteenth century has been well documented. While aggregate historical trends are easily tracked, the decision-making of individual farmers is difficult to reconstruct. We use an agent-based model to tell the history of the settlement of the West by simulating farm-level agricultural decision makin...

Expanding croplands to meet the needs of a growing population, changing diets, and biofuel production comes at the cost of reduced carbon stocks in natural vegetation and soils. Here, we present a spatially explicit global analysis of tradeoffs between carbon stocks and current crop yields. The difference among regions is striking. For example, for each unit of land cleared, the tropics lose ne...

Management Contributions to Recent Trends in U.S. Agricultural Yields” According to Lobell and Asner (1), the atypical summer cooling trend from 1982 to 1998 increased U.S. yields of corn and soybeans during the same period. However, three potential problems with their analysis bring their results and conclusion into question. The first concern relates to selective use of data in (1). To estima...

Human activities such as research & development, infrastructure or management are of major importance for agricultural productivity. These activities can be summarized as agricultural land-use intensity. We present a measure, called the τ -factor, which is an alternative to current measures for agricultural landuse intensity. The τ -factor is the ratio between actual yield and a reference yield...

Hydrothermal, dilute acid, and steam explosion pretreatment methods, were evaluated for their efficiency to improve the methane production yield of three Mediterranean agricultural lignocellulosic residues such as olive tree pruning, grapevine pruning, and almond shells. Hydrothermal and dilute acid pretreatments provided low to moderate increase in the digestibility of the biomass samples, whe...

How farming systems supply sufficient nitrogen (N) for high yields but with reduced N losses is a central challenge for reducing the tradeoffs often associated with N cycling in agriculture. Variability in soil organic matter and management of organic farms across an agricultural landscape may yield insights for improving N cycling and for evaluating novel indicators of N availability. We asses...

The sustainability of society hinges on the future of agriculture. Though alternatives to unsustainable, high-input industrial agriculture are available, agricultural systems have been slow to transition to them. Much of the resistance to adopting alternative techniques stems from the perceived costs of alternative agriculture, mainly in terms of yields. The general assumption is that agricultu...