Showing papers in "Agricultural Systems in 2008"

TL;DR: The SEAMLESS Integrated Framework for Agricultural Systems (SEAMLESS) as discussed by the authors is a framework to assess, ex-ante, agricultural and agri-environmental policies and technologies across a range of scales, from field-farm to region and European Union, as well as some global interactions.

TL;DR: In this article, two Dutch milk production systems, i.e., a conventional and an organic, were compared on their integral environmental impact and hotspots were identified in the conventional and organic milk production chains.

TL;DR: In this article, a four-year field trial was conducted on one site in south-western Germany to compare and evaluate the biomass and energy yield performance of important energy crops, including short rotation willow coppice, miscanthus, switchgrass, energy maize and two different crop rotation systems including winter oilseed rape, winter wheat and winter triticale.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify the factors that condition a household's livelihood strategy choice with a particular focus on forest products and run multinomial logit regression on asset-based explanatory variables to identify the main factors that determine households' livelihood strategy choices and forest dependence.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present and analyze spatially explicit data of grassland productivity and land use across regions in Europe, and compare with the remotely sensed normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) and simulations from two impact assessment models.

TL;DR: In this paper, ISO-compliant life cycle assessment was used to predict the broader, macroscale environmental impacts of the material and energy inputs and emissions along the US broiler supply chain.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed the efficiency with which water is used in small-scale irrigation schemes in North-West Province in South Africa and studies its determinants, showing that substantial technical inefficiencies, of 49% and 16%, exist among farmers.

TL;DR: In this article, the role of postsecondary agricultural education and training (AET) in sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the region's agricultural innovation systems is examined, where the authors argue that while AET is conventionally viewed in terms of its role in building human and scientific capital, its also has a vital role to play in building the capacity of organisations and individuals to transmit and adapt new applications of existing information, new products and processes, and new organisational cultures and behaviours.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a systematic and rigorous mathematical representation of crop rotations, and a concise mathematical framework to model crop rotation, which is useable on landscape scale modelling of agronomical practices.

TL;DR: In this article, the main impacts of climate change scenarios on maize productivity in central Chile, an irrigated Mediterranean region, and evaluate the possibility of double cropping as a response to changes in the length of the growing season.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluate the contribution of organic olive growing to the increase in the energy efficiency of Mediterranean agriculture, distinguished according to type of watering regime and intensiveness of cultivation, and show that organic management could still improve its energy efficiency if it further adjusts and internalizes the flows of nutrients needed in order to achieve greater sustainability.

TL;DR: In this paper, the methodology from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for estimating bovine GHG emissions, for census years from 1981 to 2001, was applied to the Canadian beef industry.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe agricultural intensification in the Sahel as climbing a ladder, where the first step is using organic fertilizer, seed priming, water harvesting and harvesting grains at physiological maturity to improve fodder quality.

TL;DR: In this paper, a framework including transparency and demonstration of causality, as well as accordant criteria and indicators, was developed to assess individual estimates of economic impact before inclusion in scenarios of aggregate benefits.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors apply the method of conjoint analysis to select economic, social, and ecological attributes that are perceived as important for agricultural sustainability by different stakeholders and to assess their relative impact on the overall sustainability measure.

TL;DR: An approach to rangeland management decision support is demonstrated that combines a state and transition model with a Bayesian belief network to provide a relatively simple and updatable rangelands dynamics model that can accommodate uncertainty and be used for scenario, diagnostic, and sensitivity analysis.

TL;DR: In this article, a methodology to analyse performance indicators is developed and applied to nine irrigation districts in Andalusia (Spain) using multivariate data analysis (cluster analysis), thereby enabling irrigation districts to be classified into statistically homogeneous groups.

TL;DR: In this paper, a model was used to estimate the effects of changing the forage system on farm business profit, and the models predicted that profit improvements of $70-$100 per hectare per additional tonne of home-grown forage consumed are possible from changing the base forage base.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conducted experiments under on-station and on-farm conditions to compare rice production using modified methods of irrigation, planting, weeding and nutrient management with conventional methods of cultivation.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate the economically optimal rates for 7 Ontario sites over multiple years using four yield response functional forms to examine whether the profit-maximizing rates as determined at the end of the growing season (ex post optimal rates) are generally higher than recommended rates due to site, year, or yield response response functional form differences.

TL;DR: In this paper, a new technology, consisting of coating seed of imidazolinone resistant (IR) maize varieties with the imazapyr, has proven to be very effective in controlling Striga on farmer fields.

TL;DR: In this paper, an analysis of the physical labour use, carried out on a sub-sample (43 FFS and 52 control farms), showed that the adoption of IPM in the studied farms did not lead to an increase in the overall physical labour requirement, nor in the total time spent on plant protection.

TL;DR: This paper showed that fallow length is a weak predictor of crop yields, though interactions with fertilizer inputs may increase its importance, while other factors such as drought, flooding, and pests are more important determinants of yields.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the profitability that might be expected from perennial wheat of different types using MIDAS (Model of an Integrated Dryland Agricultural System), a bioeconomic model of a mixed crop/livestock farming system.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors report on N flows, losses, and use efficiency in the production and utilization of three major grain crops using data from 2004, and also use a scenario analysis to explore strategies for improving N use efficiency.

TL;DR: In this article, a method to build up specific relationships between yield and nitrogen fertilization that takes into account agronomic techniques is proposed to better assess agro-environmental policies, the AROPAj agricultural supply model needs to take into account the technical characteristics of crop management for different farms.

TL;DR: In this article, the implications of agricultural commodity price scenarios upon the profitability and environmental impacts of various sheep systems in a main agricultural region of southern Australia are assessed using a whole-farm bioeconomic model.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used global spatial data on crop production, climate and poverty (as proxied by child stunting) to identify geographic areas of high priority for crop improvement.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of a range of seasonal scenarios on the production and profit of non-irrigated dairy farm systems using several different forage bases were investigated for two regions in southeast Australia using a systems modeling approach.

TL;DR: In this paper, a minimum data approach to model the supply of ecosystem services can potentially be applied to water conservation in Tibet, where a spatially distributed hydrological model is used to simulate the effect of irrigation on evapotranspiration reduction and stream flow enhancement.