sustainable agriculture research articles

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• Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
• v.363(1491); 2008 Feb 12

Agricultural sustainability: concepts, principles and evidence

Concerns about sustainability in agricultural systems centre on the need to develop technologies and practices that do not have adverse effects on environmental goods and services, are accessible to and effective for farmers, and lead to improvements in food productivity. Despite great progress in agricultural productivity in the past half-century, with crop and livestock productivity strongly driven by increased use of fertilizers, irrigation water, agricultural machinery, pesticides and land, it would be over-optimistic to assume that these relationships will remain linear in the future. New approaches are needed that will integrate biological and ecological processes into food production, minimize the use of those non-renewable inputs that cause harm to the environment or to the health of farmers and consumers, make productive use of the knowledge and skills of farmers, so substituting human capital for costly external inputs, and make productive use of people's collective capacities to work together to solve common agricultural and natural resource problems, such as for pest, watershed, irrigation, forest and credit management. These principles help to build important capital assets for agricultural systems: natural; social; human; physical; and financial capital. Improving natural capital is a central aim, and dividends can come from making the best use of the genotypes of crops and animals and the ecological conditions under which they are grown or raised. Agricultural sustainability suggests a focus on both genotype improvements through the full range of modern biological approaches and improved understanding of the benefits of ecological and agronomic management, manipulation and redesign. The ecological management of agroecosystems that addresses energy flows, nutrient cycling, population-regulating mechanisms and system resilience can lead to the redesign of agriculture at a landscape scale. Sustainable agriculture outcomes can be positive for food productivity, reduced pesticide use and carbon balances. Significant challenges, however, remain to develop national and international policies to support the wider emergence of more sustainable forms of agricultural production across both industrialized and developing countries.

1. The context for agricultural sustainability

The interest in the sustainability of agricultural and food systems can be traced to environmental concerns that began to appear in the 1950s–1960s. However, ideas about sustainability date back at least to the oldest surviving writings from China, Greece and Rome ( Cato 1979 ; Hesiod 1988 ; Conway 1997 ; Li Wenhua 2001 ; Pretty 2002 , 2005 a ). Today, concerns about sustainability centre on the need to develop agricultural technologies and practices that: (i) do not have adverse effects on the environment (partly because the environment is an important asset for farming), (ii) are accessible to and effective for farmers, and (iii) lead to both improvements in food productivity and have positive side effects on environmental goods and services. Sustainability in agricultural systems incorporates concepts of both resilience (the capacity of systems to buffer shocks and stresses) and persistence (the capacity of systems to continue over long periods), and addresses many wider economic, social and environmental outcomes.

In recent decades, there has been remarkable growth in agricultural production, with increases in food production across the world since the beginning of the 1960s. Since then, aggregate world food production has grown by 145%. In Africa it rose by 140%, in Latin America by almost 200% and in Asia by 280%. The greatest increases have been in China, where a fivefold increase occurred, mostly during the 1980s–1990s. In industrialized countries, production started from a higher base; yet it still doubled in the USA over 40 years and grew by 68% in Western Europe ( FAO 2005 ).

Over the same period, world population has grown from three billion to more than six billion, imposing an increasing impact of the human footprint on the Earth as consumption patterns change ( Kitzes et al . 2008 ; Pretty 2007 ). Again though, per capita agricultural production has outpaced population growth ( Hazell & Wood 2008 ): for each person today, there is an additional 25% more food compared with in 1960. These aggregate figures, however, hide important regional differences. In Asia and Latin America, per capita food production increased by 76 and 28%, respectively. Africa, though, has fared badly, with food production per person 10% lower today than in 1960. China, again, performs best, with a trebling of per capita food production over the same period. These agricultural production gains have lifted millions out of poverty and provided a platform for rural and urban economic growth in many parts of the world.

However, these advances in aggregate productivity have not brought reductions in the incidence of hunger for all. In the early twenty-first century, there are still more than 800 million people hungry and lacking adequate access to food. A third are in East and Southeast Asia, another third in South Asia, a quarter in sub-Saharan Africa and 5% each in Latin America/Caribbean and in North Africa/Near East. Nonetheless, there has been progress, as incidence of undernourishment was 960 million in 1970, comprising a third of all people in developing countries at the time.

Despite this progress in food output, it is probable that food-related ill health will remain widespread for many people. As world population continues to increase, until at least the mid-twenty-first century ( UNPD 2005 ), the absolute demand for food will also increase. Increasing incomes will also mean that people will have more purchasing power and this will increase the demand for food. But as diets change, demand for the types of food will also shift radically, with large numbers of people going through the nutrition transition. In particular, increasing urbanization ( figure 1 ) means people are more likely to adopt new diets, particularly consuming more meat, fats and refined cereals, and fewer traditional cereals, vegetables and fruits ( Popkin 1998 ).

Rural and urban world population (1950–2030; from UN (2005)).

As a result of these transitions towards calorie-rich diets, obesity, hypertension and type II diabetes have emerged as serious threats to health in most industrialized countries ( Popkin 1998 ; WHO 1998 ; Nestle 2003 ; Lang & Heasman 2004 ). A total of 20–25% of adults across Europe and North America are now classed as clinically obese (body mass index greater than 30 kg m −2 ). In some developing countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Ghana, Mexico, Peru and Tunisia, overweight people now outnumber the hungry ( WHO 1998 ). Diet-related illness now has severe and costly public health consequences ( Kenkel & Manning 1999 ; Ferro Luzzi and James 2000 ). According to the comprehensive Eurodiet (2001) study, ‘disabilities associated with high intakes of saturated fat and inadequate intakes of vegetable and fruit, together with a sedentary lifestyle, exceed the cost of tobacco use’. Some problems arise from nutritional deficiencies of iron, iodide, folic acid, vitamin D and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, but most are due to excess consumption of energy and fat (causing obesity), sodium as salt (high blood pressure), saturated and trans fats (heart disease) and refined sugars (diabetes and dental caries; Key et al. 2002 ; Frumkin 2005 ).

An important change in the world food system will come from the increased consumption of livestock products ( Fitzhugh 1998 ; Delgado et al. 1999 ; Smil 2000 ). Meat demand is expected to rise rapidly with economic growth and this will change many farming systems. Livestock are important in mixed production systems, using foods and by-products that would not have been consumed by humans. But increasingly animals are raised intensively and fed with cheap and energetically inefficient cereals and oils. In industrialized countries, 73% of cereals are fed to animals; in developing countries, some 37% are used in this way. Currently, per capita annual demand in industrialized countries is 550 kg of cereal and 78 kg of meat. By contrast, in developing countries, it is only 260 kg of cereal and 30 kg of meat.

At the same time as these recent changes in agricultural productivity, consumer behaviour over food ( Smith 2008 ) and the political economy of farming and food ( Goodman & Watts 1997 ), agricultural systems are now recognized to be a significant source of environmental harm ( Tilman 1999 ; Pretty et al. 2000 ; MEA 2005 ). Since the early 1960s, the total agricultural area has expanded by 11% from 4.5 to 5 billion ha and arable area from 1.27 to 1.4 billion ha. In industrialized countries, agricultural area has fallen by 3%, but has risen by 21% in developing countries ( figure 2 a ). Livestock production has also increased with a worldwide fourfold increase in numbers of chickens, twofold increase in pigs and 40–50% increase in numbers of cattle, sheep and goats ( figure 2 b ).

( a ) Agricultural area (1961–2002; from FAO (2005) ). ( b ) Head of livestock, world (1961–2004; from FAO (2005) ). ( c ) Irrigated area and agricultural machinery, world (1961–2002; from FAO (2005) ). ( d ) World fertilizer consumption (1961–2002; from FAO (2005) ).

During this period, the intensity of production on agricultural lands has also risen substantially ( Hazell & Wood 2008 ). The area under irrigation and number of agricultural machines has grown by approximately twofold and the consumption of all fertilizers by fourfold (nitrogen fertilizers by sevenfold; figure 2 c , d ). The use of pesticides in agriculture has also increased dramatically and now amounts to some 2.56 billion kg yr −1 . In the early twenty-first century, the annual value of the global market was US$25 billion, of which some US$3 billion of sales was in developing countries ( Pretty 2005 b ). Herbicides account for 49% of use, insecticides 25%, fungicides 22% and others approximately 3% ( table 1 ). A third of the world market by value is in the USA, which represents 22% of active ingredient use. In the USA, though, large amounts of pesticide are used in the home/garden (17% by value) and in industrial, commercial and government settings (13% by value).

World and US use of pesticide active ingredients (mean for 1998–1999). (Adapted from Pretty & Hine (2005) using EPA (2001) and OECD (2001) .)

These factors of production have had a direct impact on world food production ( figure 3 a – d ). There are clear and significant relationships between fertilizer consumption, number of agricultural machines, irrigated area, agricultural land area and arable area with total world food production (comprising all cereals, coarse grains, pulses, roots and tubers, and oil crops). The inefficient use of some of these inputs has, however, led to considerable environmental harm. Increased agricultural area contributes substantially to the loss of habitats, associated biodiversity and their valuable environmental services ( MEA 2005 ; Scherr & McNeely 2008 ). Approximately 30–80% of nitrogen applied to farmland escapes to contaminate water systems and the atmosphere as well as increasing the incidence of some disease vectors ( Smil 2001 ; Victor & Reuben 2002 ; Pretty et al. 2003 a ; Townsend et al. 2003 ; Giles 2005 ; Goulding et al . 2008 ). Irrigation water is often used inefficiently and causes waterlogging and salinization, as well as diverts water from other domestic and industrial users; and agricultural machinery has increased the consumption of fossil fuels in food production ( Leach 1976 ; Stout 1998 ).

( a ) Relationship between all fertilizers applied and world plant food production (1961–2002; from FAO (2005) ). ( b ) Relationship between world agricultural machinery and world plant food production (1961–2002; from FAO (2005) ). ( c ) Relationship between world irrigation area and world plant food production (1961–2002; from FAO (2005) ). ( d ) Relationship between world agricultural land area and world plant food production (1961–2002; from FAO (2005) ).

Figure 3 clearly shows the past effectiveness of these factors of production in increasing agricultural productivity. One argument is to suggest that the persistent world food crisis indicates a need for substantially greater use of these inputs ( Avery 1995 ; Cassman et al. 2002 ; Trewevas 2002 ; Green et al. 2005 ; Tripp 2006 ). But it would be both simplistic and optimistic to assume that all these relationships will remain linear in the future and that gains will continue at the previous rates ( Tilman 1999 ). This would assume a continuing supply of these factors and inputs, and that the environmental costs of their use will be small. There is also growing evidence to suggest that this approach to agricultural growth has reached critical environmental limits, and that the aggregate costs in terms of lost or foregone benefits from environmental services are too great for the world to bear ( Ruttan 1999 ; MEA 2005 ; Kitzes et al . 2008 ). The costs of these environmental problems are often called externalities as they do not appear in any formal accounting systems. Yet many agricultural systems themselves are now suffering because key natural assets that they require to be plentiful are being undermined or diminished.

Agricultural systems in all parts of the world will have to make improvements. In many, the challenge is to increase food production to solve immediate problems of hunger. In others, the focus will be more on adjustments that maintain food production while increasing the flow of environmental goods and services. World population is set to continue to increase for approximately another 40 years to approximately 2040–2050, and then is likely to stabilize or fall owing to changes in fertility patterns ( figure 4 ). The high-fertility projection by the UN (2005) is unlikely to arise, as shifts towards lower fertility are already occurring in many countries worldwide and so there are very real prospects of world population eventually falling over one to two centuries after the maximum is reached. This suggests that the agricultural and food challenge is likely to be more acute in the next half-century, and thereafter qualitatively change according to people's aggregate consumption patterns.

World population 1950–2300 (from UN, 2005).

2. What is sustainable agriculture?

What, then, do we now understand by agricultural sustainability? Many different expressions have come to be used to imply greater sustainability in some agricultural systems over prevailing ones (both pre-industrial and industrialized). These include biodynamic, community based, ecoagriculture, ecological, environmentally sensitive, extensive, farm fresh, free range, low input, organic, permaculture, sustainable and wise use ( Pretty 1995 ; Conway 1997 ; NRC 2000 ; McNeely & Scherr 2003 ; Clements & Shrestha 2004 ; Cox et al. 2004 ; Gliessman 2005 ). There is continuing and intense debate about whether agricultural systems using some of these terms can qualify as sustainable ( Balfour 1943 ; Lampkin & Padel 1994 ; Altieri 1995 ; Trewevas 2002 ).

Systems high in sustainability can be taken as those that aim to make the best use of environmental goods and services while not damaging these assets ( Altieri 1995 ; Pretty 1995 , 1998 , 2005 a , b ; Conway 1997 ; Hinchcliffe et al. 1999 ; NRC 2000 ; Li Wenhua 2001 ; Jackson & Jackson 2002 ; Tilman et al. 2002 ; Uphoff 2002 ; McNeely & Scherr 2003 ; Gliessman 2004 , 2005 ; Swift et al. 2004 ; Tomich et al. 2004 ; MEA 2005 ; Scherr & McNeely 2008 ; Kesavan & Swaminathan 2008 ). The key principles for sustainability are to:

• integrate biological and ecological processes such as nutrient cycling, nitrogen fixation, soil regeneration, allelopathy, competition, predation and parasitism into food production processes,
• minimize the use of those non-renewable inputs that cause harm to the environment or to the health of farmers and consumers,
• make productive use of the knowledge and skills of farmers, thus improving their self-reliance and substituting human capital for costly external inputs, and
• make productive use of people's collective capacities to work together to solve common agricultural and natural resource problems, such as for pest, watershed, irrigation, forest and credit management.

The idea of agricultural sustainability, though, does not mean ruling out any technologies or practices on ideological grounds. If a technology works to improve productivity for farmers and does not cause undue harm to the environment, then it is likely to have some sustainability benefits. Agricultural systems emphasizing these principles also tend to be multifunctional within landscapes and economies ( Dobbs & Pretty 2004 ; MEA 2005 ). They jointly produce food and other goods for farmers and markets, but also contribute to a range of valued public goods, such as clean water, wildlife and habitats, carbon sequestration, flood protection, groundwater recharge, landscape amenity value and leisure/tourism. In this way, sustainability can be seen as both relative and case dependent and implies a balance between a range of agricultural and environmental goods and services.

As a more sustainable agriculture seeks to make the best use of nature's goods and services, technologies and practices must be locally adapted and fitted to place. These are most likely to emerge from new configurations of social capital, comprising relations of trust embodied in new social organizations, new horizontal and vertical partnerships between institutions, and human capital comprising leadership, ingenuity, management skills and capacity to innovate. Agricultural systems with high levels of social and human assets are more able to innovate in the face of uncertainty ( Chambers et al. 1989 ; Uphoff 1998 ; Bunch & Lopez 1999 ; Olsson & Folke 2001 ; Pretty & Ward 2001 ). This suggests that there likely to be many pathways towards agricultural sustainability, and further implies that no single configuration of technologies, inputs and ecological management is more likely to be widely applicable than the other. Agricultural sustainability implies the need to fit these factors to the specific circumstances of different agricultural systems.

A common, though erroneous, assumption about agricultural sustainability is that it implies a net reduction in input use, thus making such systems essentially extensive (they require more land to produce the same amount of food). Recent empirical evidence shows that successful agricultural sustainability initiatives and projects arise from shifts in the factors of agricultural production (e.g. from use of fertilizers to nitrogen-fixing legumes; from pesticides to emphasis on natural enemies; from ploughing to zero-tillage). A better concept than extensive is one that centres on intensification of resources, making better use of existing resources (e.g. land, water, biodiversity) and technologies ( Conway & Pretty 1991 ; Pretty et al. 2000 ; Buttel 2003 ; Tegtmeier & Duffy 2004 ). The critical question centres on the ‘type of intensification’. Intensification using natural, social and human capital assets, combined with the use of best available technologies and inputs (best genotypes and best ecological management) that minimize or eliminate harm to the environment, can be termed ‘sustainable intensification’.

3. Capital assets for agricultural systems

What makes agriculture unique as an economic sector is that it directly affects many of the very assets on which it relies for success. Agricultural systems at all levels rely on the value of services flowing from the total stock of assets that they influence and control, and five types of asset—natural, social, human, physical and financial capital—are now recognized as being important. There are, though, some advantages and misgivings with the use of the term capital. On the one hand, capital implies an asset, and assets should be cared for, protected and accumulated over long periods. On the other hand, capital can imply easy measurability and transferability. Since the value of something can be assigned a monetary value, then it can appear not to matter if it is lost, as the required money could simply be allocated to purchase another asset or to transfer it from elsewhere. But nature and its wider values is not so easily replaceable as a commodity ( Coleman 1988 ; Ostrom 1990 ; Putnam et al . 1993 ; Flora & Flora 1996 ; Benton 1998 ; Uphoff 1998 , 2002 ; Costanza et al . 1997 ; Pretty 2003 ). Nonetheless, terms such as natural, social and human capital are useful in helping to shape concepts around basic questions such as what is agriculture for and what system works best. The five capitals are defined in the following ways:

• Natural capital produces environmental goods and services and is the source of food (both farmed and harvested or caught from the wild), wood and fibre; water supply and regulation; treatment, assimilation and decomposition of wastes; nutrient cycling and fixation; soil formation; biological control of pests; climate regulation; wildlife habitats; storm protection and flood control; carbon sequestration; pollination; and recreation and leisure ( Costanza et al . 1997 ; MEA 2005 ).
• Social capital yields a flow of mutually beneficial collective action, contributing to the cohesiveness of people in their societies. The social assets comprising social capital include norms, values and attitudes that predispose people to cooperate; relations of trust, reciprocity and obligations; and common rules and sanctions mutually agreed or handed down. These are connected and structured in networks and groups ( Flora & Flora 1996 ; Cramb & Culasero 2003 ; Pretty 2003 ).
• Human capital is the total capability residing in individuals, based on their stock of knowledge skills, health and nutrition ( Orr 1992 ; Byerlee 1998 ; Leeuwis 2004 ; Lieblin et al. 2004 ). It is enhanced by access to services such as schools, medical services and adult training. People's productivity is increased by their capacity to interact with productive technologies and other people. Leadership and organizational skills are particularly important in making other resources more valuable.
• Physical capital is the store of human-made material resources and comprises buildings, such as housing and factories, market infrastructure, irrigation works, roads and bridges, tools and tractors, communications, and energy and transportation systems, which make labour more productive.
• Financial capital is more of an accounting concept, as it serves as a facilitating role rather than as a source of productivity in and of itself. It represents accumulated claims on goods and services, built up through financial systems that gather savings and issue credit such as pensions, remittances, welfare payments, grants and subsidies.

As agricultural systems shape the very assets on which they rely for inputs, a vital feedback loop occurs from outcomes to inputs ( Worster 1993 ). Thus, sustainable agricultural systems tend to have a positive effect on natural, social and human capital, while unsustainable ones feedback to deplete these assets, leaving fewer for future generations. For example, an agricultural system that erodes soil while producing food externalizes costs that others must bear. But one that sequesters carbon in soils through organic matter accumulation helps to mediate climate change. Similarly, a diverse agricultural system that enhances on-farm wildlife for pest control contributes to wider stocks of biodiversity, while simplified modernized systems that eliminate wildlife do not. Agricultural systems that offer labour-absorption opportunities, through resource improvements or value-added activities, can boost local economies and help to reverse rural-to-urban migration patterns ( Carney 1998 ; Dasgupta 1998 ; Ellis 2000 ; Morison et al. 2005 ; Pretty et al. 2006 ).

Any activities that lead to improvements in these renewable capital assets thus make a contribution towards sustainability. However, agricultural sustainability does not require that all assets are improved at the same time. One agricultural system that contributes more to these capital assets than the other can be said to be more sustainable, but there may still be trade-offs with one asset increasing as the other falls. In practice, though, there are usually strong links between changes in natural, social and human capital ( Pretty 2003 ), with agricultural systems having many potential effects on all three.

Agriculture is, therefore, fundamentally multifunctional. It jointly produces many unique non-food functions that cannot be produced by other economic sectors so efficiently. Clearly, a key policy challenge, for both industrialized and developing countries, is to find ways to maintain and enhance food production. But a key question is: can this be done while seeking to both improve the positive side effects and eliminate the negative ones? It will not be easy, as past agricultural development has tended to ignore both the multifunctionality of agriculture and the considerable external costs.

4. Side effects and externalities

There are surprisingly few data on the environmental and health costs imposed by agriculture on other sectors and interests. Agriculture can negatively affect the environment through overuse of natural resources as inputs or their use as a sink for pollution. Such effects are called negative externalities because they are usually non-market effects and therefore their costs are not part of market prices. Negative externalities are one of the classic causes of market failure whereby the polluter does not pay the full costs of their actions, and therefore these costs are called external costs ( Baumol & Oates 1988 ; Pretty et al. 2000 , 2003 a ; Dobbs & Pretty 2004 ; Moss 2008 ).

Externalities in the agricultural sector have at least four features: (i) their costs are often neglected, (ii) they often occur with a time lag, (iii) they often damage groups whose interests are not well represented in political or decision-making processes, and (iv) the identity of the source of the externality is not always known. For example, farmers generally have few incentives to prevent some pesticides escaping to water bodies, to the atmosphere and to nearby natural systems as they transfer the full cost of cleaning up the environmental consequences to society at large. In the same way, pesticide manufacturers do not pay the full cost of all their products, as they do not have to pay for any adverse side effects that may occur.

Partly as a result of lack of information, there is little agreement on the economic costs of externalities in agriculture. Some authors suggest that the current system of economic calculations grossly underestimates the current and future value of natural capital ( Abramovitz 1997 ; Costanza et al. 1997 ; Daily 1997 ; MEA 2005 ). However, such valuation of ecosystem services remains controversial owing to methodological and measurement problems ( Georgiou et al . 1998 ; Hanley et al. 1998 ; Carson 2000 ; Farrow et al. 2000 ; Pretty et al. 2003 a ) and the role monetary values have in influencing public opinions and policy decisions.

What has become clear in recent years is that the success of modern agriculture has masked some significant negative externalities, with environmental and health problems documented and recently costed for Ecuador, China, Germany, the Philippines, the UK and the USA ( Pingali & Roger 1995 ; Crissman et al. 1998 ; Waibel et al . 1999 ; Pretty et al. 2000 , 2001 , 2003 a ; Pretty 2005 b ; Cuyno et al. 2001 ; Norse et al. 2001 ; Buttel 2003 ; Tegtmeier & Duffy 2004 ; Sherwood et al. 2005 ; Zhao et al . 2008 ). These environmental costs begin to change conclusions about which agricultural systems are the most efficient and suggest that alternatives that reduce externalities should be sought.

Examples of costs in developing countries include that in the Philippines, where agricultural systems that do not use pesticides result in greater net social benefits owing to the reduction in illnesses among farmers and their families, and the associated treatment costs ( Rola & Pingali 1993 ; Pingali & Roger 1995 ). In China, the externalities of pesticides used in rice systems cause $1.4 billion of costs per year through health costs to people, and adverse effects on both on- and off-farm biodiversity ( Norse et al. 2001 ). In Ecuador, annual mortality in the remote highlands due to pesticides is among the highest reported anywhere in the world at 21 people per 100 000 people, and so the economic benefits of integrated pest management (IPM)-based systems that eliminate these effects are increasingly beneficial ( Sherwood et al. 2005 ). In the UK, agricultural externalities have been calculated to be some £1.5 billion per year in the late 1990s, a cost that is greater than net farm income (Pretty et al. 2000 , 2001 ). These, though, are exceeded by the environmental costs of transporting food from farm to retail outlet to place of consumption—these ‘food miles’ in the UK result in a further £3.8 billion of environmental costs per year ( Pretty et al. 2005 ).

These data suggest that all types of agricultural systems impose some kinds of costs on the environment. It is, therefore, impossible to draw a boundary between what is sustainable and what is not. If the external costs are high and can be reduced by the adoption of new practices and technologies, then this is a move towards sustainability. Agricultural sustainability is thus partly a matter of judgement, which in turn depends on the comparators and baselines chosen. One system may be said to be more sustainable relative to another if its negative externalities are lower. Monetary criteria do, though, only capture some of the values of agricultural systems and the resources upon which they impinge ( Carson 2000 ), and so choices may depend on wider questions about the sustainability of farm practices (on farm, in field) and the sustainability of whole landscapes (interactions between agricultural and wild habitats; Green et al. 2005 ; Shennan 2008 ; Waage & Mumford 2008 ; Wade et al . 2008 ).

5. Improving natural capital for agroecosystems

Agricultural sustainability emphasizes the potential benefits that arise from making the best use of both genotypes of crops and animals and their agroecological management. Agricultural sustainability does not, therefore, mean ruling out any technologies or practices on ideological grounds (e.g. genetically modified or organic crops)—provided they improve biological and/or economic productivity for farmers and do not harm the environment ( NRC 2000 ; Pretty 2001 ; Uphoff 2002 ; Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2004 ). Agricultural sustainability, therefore, emphasizes the potential dividends that can come from making the best use of the genotypes (G) of crops and animals ( Dennis et al . 2008 ; Shennan 2008 ; Witcombe et al . 2008 ) and the ecological (Ec) conditions under which they are grown or raised. The outcome is a result of this G×Ec interaction ( Khush et al. 1998 ). Agricultural sustainability suggests a focus on both genotype improvements through the full range of modern biological approaches, as well as improved understanding of the benefits of ecological and agronomic management, manipulation and redesign ( Collard & Mackill 2008 ; Flint & Wooliams 2008 ; Thomson 2008 ).

Agricultural systems, or agroecosystems, are amended ecosystems ( Conway 1985 ; Gliessman 1998 , 2005 ; Olsson & Folke 2001 ; Dalgaard et al. 2003 ; Odum & Barrett 2004 ; Swift et al. 2004 ) that have a variety of different properties ( table 2 ). Modern agricultural systems have amended some of these properties to increase productivity. Sustainable agroecosystems, by contrast, have to seek to shift some of these properties towards natural systems without significantly trading off productivity. Modern agroecosystems have, for example, tended towards high through-flow systems, with energy supplied by fossil fuels directed out of the system (either deliberately for harvests or accidentally through side effects). For a transition towards sustainability, renewable sources of energy need to be maximized and some energy flows directed to fuel essential internal tropic interactions (e.g. to soil organic matter or to weeds for arable birds) so as to maintain other ecosystem functions ( Rydberg & Jansén 2002 ; Champion et al. 2003 ; Haberl et al. 2004 ; Firbank et al. 2006 , 2008 ). All annual crops, though, are derived from opportunists and so their resource use is inherently different to perennials.

Properties of natural ecosystems compared with modern and sustainable agroecosystems. (Adapted from Gliessman (2005) .)

Modern agriculture has also come to rely heavily on nutrient inputs obtained from or driven by fossil fuel-based sources. Nutrients are also used inefficiently and together with certain products (e.g. ammonia, nitrate, methane, carbon dioxide) are lost to the environment. For sustainability, nutrient leaks need to be reduced to a minimum, recycling and feedback mechanisms introduced and strengthened, and nutrients and materials diverted to capital accumulation. Agroecosystems are considerably more simplified than natural ecosystems, and loss of biological diversity (to improve crop and livestock productivity) results in the loss of some ecosystem services, such as pest and disease control ( Gallagher et al . 2005 ). For sustainability, biological diversity needs to be increased to recreate natural control and regulation functions and to manage pests and diseases rather than seeking to eliminate them. Mature ecosystems are now known to be not stable and unchanging, but in a state of dynamic equilibrium that buffers against large shocks and stresses. Modern agroecosystems have weak resilience, and for transitions towards sustainability need to focus on structures and functions that improve resilience ( Holling et al. 1998 ; Folke 2006 ; Shennan 2008 ).

But converting an agroecosystem to a more sustainable design is complex, and generally requires a landscape or bioregional approach to restoration or management ( Kloppenburg et al. 1996 ; Higgs 2003 ; Jordan 2003 ; Odum & Barrett 2004 ; Swift et al. 2004 ; Terwan et al. 2004 ). An agroecosystem is a bounded system designed to produce food and fibre, yet it is also part of a wider landscape at which scale a number of ecosystem functions are important ( Gliessman 2005 ). For sustainability, interactions need to be developed between agroecosystems and whole landscapes of other farms and non-farmed or wild habitats (e.g. wetlands, woods, riverine habitats), as well as social systems of food procurement. Mosaic landscapes with a variety of farmed and non-farmed habitats are known to be good for birds as well as farms ( Bignall & McCracken 1996 ; Shennan et al. 2005 ; Woodhouse et al. 2005 ; Wade et al . 2008 ).

There are several types of resource-conserving technologies and practices that can be used to improve the stocks and use of natural capital in and around agroecosystems. These are:

• IPM , which uses ecosystem resilience and diversity for pest, disease and weed control, and seeks only to use pesticides when other options are ineffective (e.g. Lewis et al. 1997 ; Gallagher et al. 2005 ; Herren et al. 2005 ; Hassanali et al . 2008 ; Bale et al . 2008 ).
• Integrated nutrient management , which seeks both to balance the need to fix nitrogen within farm systems with the need to import inorganic and organic sources of nutrients and to reduce nutrient losses through erosion control ( Crews & Peoples 2004 ; Leach et al. 2004 ; Goulding et al . 2008 ; Moss 2008 ).
• Conservation tillage , which reduces the amount of tillage, sometime to zero, so that soil can be conserved and available moisture used more efficiently ( Petersen et al. 2000 ; Holland 2004 ; Hobbs et al . 2008 ).
• Agroforestry , which incorporates multifunctional trees into agricultural systems and collective management of nearby forest resources ( Leakey et al . 2005 ).
• Aquaculture , which incorporates fish, shrimps and other aquatic resources into farm systems, such as into irrigated rice fields and fish ponds, and so leads to increases in protein production ( Bunting 2007 ).
• Water harvesting in dryland areas, which means formerly abandoned and degraded lands can be cultivated, and additional crops can be grown on small patches of irrigated land owing to better rain water retention ( Pretty 1995 ; Reij 1996 ), and improving water productivity of crops ( Morison et al. 2008 ).
• Livestock integration into farming systems, such as dairy cattle, pigs and poultry, including using zero-grazing cut and carry systems ( Altieri 1995 ; Wilkins 2008 ).

Many of these individual technologies are also multifunctional ( Pretty 1995 ; Lewis et al. 1997 ). This implies that their adoption should mean favourable changes in several components of the farming system at the same time. For example, hedgerows and alley crops encourage predators and act as windbreaks, thus reducing soil erosion. Legumes introduced into rotations fix nitrogen, and also act as a break crop to prevent carry-over of pests and diseases. Grass contour strips slow surface-water run-off, encourage percolation to groundwater and can be a source of fodder for livestock. Catch crops prevent soil erosion and leaching during critical periods, and can also be ploughed in as a green manure. The incorporation of green manures not only provides a readily available source of nutrients for the growing crop but also increases soil organic matter and hence water-retentive capacity, further reducing susceptibility to erosion.

Although many resource-conserving technologies and practices are currently being used, the total number of farmers using them worldwide is still relatively small. This is because their adoption is not a costless process for farmers. They cannot simply cut their existing use of fertilizer or pesticides and hope to maintain outputs, thus making operations more profitable. They also cannot simply introduce a new productive element into their farming systems and hope it would succeed. These transition costs arise for several reasons. Farmers must first invest in learning ( Orr 1992 ; Röling & Wagermakers 1997 ; Bentley et al. 2003 ; Lieblin et al. 2004 ; Bawden 2005 ; Chambers 2005 ). As recent and current policies have tended to promote specialized, non-adaptive systems with a lower innovation capacity, farmers have to spend time learning about a greater diversity of practices and measures ( Gallagher et al . 2005 ; Kesavan & Swaminathan 2008 ). Lack of information and management skills is, therefore, a major barrier to the adoption of sustainable agriculture. During the transition period, farmers must experiment more and thus incur the costs of making mistakes as well as of acquiring new knowledge and information.

The on-farm biological processes that make sustainable agroecosystems productive also take time to become established ( Firbank et al . 2008 ; Kibblewhite et al . 2008 ; Wade et al . 2008 ). These include the rebuilding of depleted natural buffers of predator stocks and wild host plants; increasing the levels of nutrients; developing and exploiting microenvironments and positive interactions between them; and the establishment and growth of trees. These higher variable and capital investment costs must be incurred before returns increase. Examples include: labour in construction of soil and water conservation measures; planting of trees and hedgerows; pest and predator monitoring and management; fencing of paddocks; the establishment of zero-grazing units; and purchase of new technologies, such as manure storage equipment or global positioning systems for tractors.

It has also been argued that farmers adopting more sustainable agroecosystems are internalizing many of the agricultural externalities associated with intensive farming and hence could be compensated for effectively providing environmental goods and services. Providing such compensation or incentives would be likely to increase the adoption of resource conserving technologies ( Dobbs & Pretty 2004 ). Nonetheless, periods of lower yields seem to be more apparent during conversions of industrialized agroecosystems. There is growing evidence to suggest that most pre-industrial and modernized farming systems in developing countries can make rapid transitions to both sustainable and productive farming.

6. Effects of sustainable agriculture on yields

One persistent question regarding the potential benefits of more sustainable agroecosystems centres on productivity trade-offs. If environmental goods and services are to be protected or improved, what then happens to productivity? If it falls, then more land will be required to produce the same amount of food, thus resulting in further losses of natural capital ( Green et al. 2005 ). As indicated earlier, the challenge is to seek sustainable intensification of all resources in order to improve food production. In industrialized farming systems, this has proven impossible to do with organic production systems, as food productivity is lower for both crop and livestock systems ( Lampkin & Padel 1994 ; Caporali et al. 2003 ). Nonetheless, there are now some 3 Mha of agricultural land in Europe managed with certified organic practices. Some have led to lower energy use (though lower yields too), others to better nutrient retention and some greater nutrient losses (Dalgaard et al. 1998 , 2002 ; Løes & Øgaard 2003 ; Gosling & Shepherd 2004 ), and some to greater labour absorption ( Morison et al. 2005 ; Pretty et al. 2006 ).

Many other farmers have adopted integrated farming practices, which represent a step or several steps towards sustainability. What has become increasingly clear is that many modern farming systems are wasteful, as integrated farmers have found they can cut down many purchased inputs without losing out on profitability ( EA 2005 ). Some of these cuts in use are substantial, others are relatively small. By adopting better targeting and precision methods, there is less wastage and more benefit to the environment. They can then make greater cuts in input use once they substitute some regenerative technologies for external inputs, such as legumes for inorganic fertilizers or predators for pesticides. Finally, they can replace some or all external inputs entirely over time once they have learned their way into a new type of farming characterized by new goals and technologies ( Pretty & Ward 2001 ).

However, it is in developing countries that some of the most significant progress towards sustainable agroecosystems has been made in the past decade ( Uphoff 2002 ; McNeely & Scherr 2003 ; Pretty et al. 2003 b ). The largest study comprised the analysis of 286 projects in 57 countries ( Pretty et al. 2006 ). This involved the use of both questionnaires and published reports by projects to assess changes over time. As in earlier research ( Pretty et al. 2003 b ), data were triangulated from several sources and cross-checked by external reviewers and regional experts. The study involved analysis of projects sampled once in time ( n =218) and those sampled twice over a 4-year period ( n =68). Not all proposed cases were accepted for the dataset and rejections were based on a strict set of criteria. As this was a purposive sample of ‘best practice’ initiatives, the findings are not representative of all developing country farms.

Table 3 contains a summary of the location and extent of the 286 agricultural sustainability projects across the eight categories of FAO farming systems ( Dixon et al. 2001 ) in the 57 countries. In all, some 12.6 million farmers on 37 Mha were engaged in transitions towards agricultural sustainability in these 286 projects. This is just over 3% of the total cultivated area (1.136 Mha) in developing countries. The largest number of farmers was in wetland rice-based systems, mainly in Asia (category 2), and the largest area was in dualistic mixed systems, mainly in southern Latin America (category 6). This study showed that agricultural sustainability was spreading to more farmers and hectares. In the 68 randomly re-sampled projects from the original study, there was a 54% increase over the 4 years in the number of farmers and 45% in the number of hectares. These resurveyed projects comprised 60% of the farmers and 44% of the hectares in the original sample of 208 projects.

Summary of adoption and impact of agricultural sustainability technologies and practices on 286 projects in 57 countries.

For the 360 reliable yield comparisons from 198 projects, the mean relative yield increase was 79% across the very wide variety of systems and crop types. However, there was a widespread in results ( figure 5 ). While 25% of projects reported relative yields greater than 2.0 (i.e. 100% increase), half of all the projects had yield increases between 18 and 100%. The geometric mean is a better indicator of the average for such data with a positive skew, but this still shows a 64% increase in yield. However, the average hides large and statistically significant differences between the main crops ( figure 6 a , b ). In nearly all cases, there was an increase in yield with the project. Only in rice there were three reports where yields decreased, and the increase in rice was the lowest (mean=1.35), although it constituted a third of all the crop data. Cotton showed a similarly small mean yield increase.

Histogram of change in crop yield after or with project, compared with before or without project ( n =360, mean =1.79, s.d.=0.91, median=1.50, geometric mean=1.64).

( a ) Mean changes in crop yield after or with project, compared with before or without project. Vertical lines indicate ±s.e.m. ‘Other’ group consists of sugar cane ( n =2), quinoa (1), oats (2). ( b ) Relationship between relative changes in crop yield after (or with project) to yield before (or without project). Only field crops with n >9 shown.

These sustainable agroecosystems also have positive side effects, helping to build natural capital, strengthen communities (social capital) and develop human capacities ( Ostrom 1990 ; Pretty 2003 ). Examples of positive side effects recently recorded in various developing countries include:

• improvements to natural capital , including increased water retention in soils, improvements in water table (with more drinking water in the dry season), reduced soil erosion combined with improved organic matter in soils, leading to better carbon sequestration, and increased agrobiodiversity
• improvements to social capital , including more and stronger social organizations at local level, new rules and norms for managing collective natural resources, and better connectedness to external policy institutions
• improvements to human capital , including more local capacity to experiment and solve own problems, reduced incidence of malaria in rice-fish zones, increased self-esteem in formerly marginalized groups, increased status of women, better child health and nutrition, especially in dry seasons, and reversed migration and more local employment.

What we do not know, however, is the full economic benefits of these spin-offs. In many industrialized countries, agriculture is now assumed to contribute very little to gross domestic product, leading many commentators to assume that agriculture is not important for modernized economies ( NRC 2000 ). But such a conclusion is a function of the fact that very few measures are being made of the positive side effects of agriculture ( MEA 2005 ). In poor countries, where financial support is limited and markets weak, then people rely even more on the value they can derive from the natural environment and from working together to achieve collective outcomes.

7. Effects of sustainable agriculture on pesticide use and yields

Recent IPM programmes, particularly in developing countries, are beginning to show how pesticide use can be reduced and pest management practices can be modified without yield penalties ( Brethour & Weerskink 2001 ; Wilson & Tisdell 2001 ; Gallagher et al . 2005 ; Herren et al. 2005 ; Pretty & Waibel 2005 ; Hassanali et al . 2008 ). In principle, there are four possible trajectories of impact if IPM is introduced:

• pesticide use and yields increase (A),
• pesticide use increases, but yields decline (B),
• both pesticide use and yields fall (C) and
• pesticide use declines, but yields increase (D).

The assumption in modern agriculture is that pesticide use and yields are positively correlated. For IPM, the trajectory moving into sector A is therefore unlikely but not impossible, for example in low-input systems. What is expected is a move into sector C. While a change into sector B would be against economic rationale, farmers are unlikely to adopt IPM if their profits would be lowered. A shift into sector D would indicate that current pesticide use has negative yield effects or that the amount saved from pesticides is reallocated to other yield-increasing inputs. This could be possible with excessive use of herbicides or when pesticides cause outbreaks of secondary pests, such as observed with the brown plant hopper in rice ( Kenmore et al. 1984 ).

Figure 7 a , b shows data from 62 IPM initiatives in 26 developing and industrialized countries (Australia, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Laos, Nepal, Netherlands, Pakistan, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Tanzania, Thailand, UK, USA, Vietnam and Zimbabwe; Pretty & Waibel 2005 ). The 62 IPM initiatives have some 5.4 million farm households on 25.3 Mha. The evidence on pesticide use is derived from data on both the number of sprays per hectare and the amount of active ingredient used per hectare. This analysis does not include recent evidence on the effect of some genetically modified crops, some of which result in reductions in the use of herbicides ( Champion et al. 2003 ) and pesticides ( Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2004 ), and some of which have led to increases ( Benbrook 2003 ).

( a ) Association between pesticide use and crop yields (data from 80 crop combinations, 62 projects, 26 countries). ( b ) Changes in pesticide use and yields in 62 projects (A: n =10; C: n =5; D: n =47).

There is only one sector B case reported in recent literature ( Feder et al. 2004 ). Such a case has recently been reported from Java for rice farmers. The cases in sector C, where yields fall slightly while pesticide use falls dramatically, are mainly cereal-farming systems in Europe, where yields typically fall to some 80% of current levels while pesticide use is reduced to 10–90% of current levels ( Röling & Wagemakers 1997 ; Pretty 1998 ). Sector A contains 10 projects where total pesticide use has indeed increased in the course of IPM introduction. These are mainly in zero-tillage and conservation agriculture systems, where reduced tillage creates substantial benefits for soil health and reduced off-site pollution and flooding costs. These systems usually require increased use of herbicides for weed control ( de Freitas 1999 ), though there are some examples of organic zero-tillage systems ( Petersen et al. 2000 ). Over 60% of the projects are in category D where pesticide use declines and yields increase. While pesticide reduction is to be expected, as farmers substitute pesticides by information, yield increase induced by IPM is a more complex issue. It is probable, for example, that farmers who receive good quality field training will not only improve their pest management skills but also become more efficient in other agronomic practices such as water, soil and nutrient management. They can also invest some of the cash saved from pesticides in other inputs such as higher quality seeds and inorganic fertilizers.

8. Effects on carbon balances

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change established an international policy context for the reduction of carbon emissions and increases in carbon sinks in order to address the global challenge of anthropogenic interference with the climate system. It is clear that both emission reductions and sink growth will be necessary for mitigation of current climate change trends ( Watson et al. 2000 ; IPCC 2001 ; Royal Society 2001 ; Swingland 2003 ; Oelbermann et al . 2004 ; Hobbs et al . 2008 ; Lal 2008 ; Smith et al . 2008 ). A source is any process or activity that releases a greenhouse gas, or aerosol or a precursor of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, whereas a sink is such mechanism that removes these from the atmosphere. Carbon sequestration is defined as the capture and secure storage of carbon that would otherwise be emitted to or remain in the atmosphere. Agricultural systems emit carbon through the direct use of fossil fuels in food production, the indirect use of embodied energy in inputs that are energy intensive to manufacture, and the cultivation of soils and/or soil erosion resulting in the loss of soil organic matter. Agriculture also contributes to climate change through the emissions of methane from irrigated rice systems and ruminant livestock. The direct effects of land use and land-use change (including forest loss) have led to a net emission of 1.7 Gt C yr −1 in the 1980s and 1.6 Gt C yr −1 in the 1990s ( Watson et al. 2000 ; Bellamy et al . 2005 ).

On the other hand, agriculture is also an accumulator of carbon when organic matter is accumulated in the soil, and when above-ground biomass acts either as a permanent sink or is used as an energy source that substitutes for fossil fuels and thus avoids carbon emissions. There are 3 main mechanisms and 21 technical options ( table 4 ) by which positive actions can be taken by farmers by:

• increasing carbon sinks in soil organic matter and above-ground biomass,
• avoiding carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions from farms by reducing direct and indirect energy use, and
• increasing renewable energy production from biomass that either substitutes for consumption of fossil fuels or replacing inefficient burning of fuelwood or crop residues, and so avoids carbon emissions.

Mechanisms for increasing carbon sinks and reducing CO 2 and other greenhouse gas emissions in agricultural systems. (Adapted from Pretty et al . (2002) and Smith et al . (2008) .)

The potential annual contributions being made in the 286 projects ( Pretty et al. 2006 ) to carbon sink increases in soils and trees were calculated, using an established methodology ( Pretty et al . 2002 ; table 5 ). As the focus is on what sustainable methods can do to increase quantities of soil and above-ground carbon, no account was taken of existing stocks of carbon. Soil carbon sequestration is corrected for climate, as rates are higher in humid when compared with dry zones and generally higher in temperate than tropical areas.

Summary of potential carbon sequestered in soils and above-ground biomass in the 286 projects. (±s.e. in brackets.)

These projects were potentially sequestering 11.4 Mt C yr −1 on 37 Mha. The average gain was 0.35 t C ha −1  yr −1 , with an average per household gain of 0.91 t C yr −1 . The per hectare gains vary from 0.15 t C ha −1  yr −1 for smallholder irrigated systems (category 1) to 0.46 t C ha −1  yr −1 for category three systems. For most systems, per households gains were in the range 0.05–0.5 t C yr −1 , with the much larger farms of southern Latin America using zero-tillage and conservation agriculture achieving the most at 14.9 t C yr −1 ( Hobbs et al . 2008 ). Such gains in carbon may offer new opportunities for income generation under carbon trading schemes ( Swingland 2003 ).

9. The wider policy context

Three things are now clear from evidence on the recent spread of agricultural sustainability.

• Many technologies and social processes for local scale adoption of more sustainable agricultural systems are increasingly well tested and established.
• The social and institutional conditions for spread are less well understood, but have been established in several contexts, leading to more rapid spread during the 1990s–early 2000s.
• The political conditions for the emergence of supportive policies are the least well established, with only a few examples of positive progress.

As indicated above, agricultural sustainability can contribute to increased food production, as well as makes a positive impact on environmental goods and services. Clearly, much can be done with existing resources, but a wider transition towards a more sustainable agriculture will not occur without some external support and money. There are always transition costs in developing new or adapting old technologies, in learning to work together and in breaking free from existing patterns of thought and practice. It also costs time and money to rebuild depleted natural and social capital.

Most agricultural sustainability improvements occurring in the 1990s and early 2000s appear to have arisen despite existing national and institutional policies, rather than because of them ( Dasgupta 1998 ). Although almost every country would now say it supports the idea of agricultural sustainability, the evidence points towards only patchy reforms. Only three countries have given explicit national support for sustainable agriculture: Cuba has a national policy for alternative agriculture; Switzerland has three tiers of support to encourage environmental services from agriculture and rural development; and Bhutan has a national environmental policy coordinated across all sectors ( Funes et al. 2002 ; Pretty 2002 ; Herzog et al. 2005 ; Zhao et al . 2008 ).

Several countries have given subregional support to agricultural sustainability, such as the states of Santa Caterina, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil supporting zero-tillage, catchment management and rural agribusiness development, and some states in India supporting participatory watershed and irrigation management. A larger number of countries have reformed parts of agricultural policies, such as China's support for integrated ecological demonstration villages, Kenya's catchment approach to soil conservation, Indonesia's ban on pesticides and programme for farmer field schools, Bolivia's regional integration of agricultural and rural policies, Sweden's support for organic agriculture, Burkina Faso's land policy and Sri Lanka and the Philippines' stipulation that water users' groups be formed to manage irrigation systems. In Europe and North America, a number of agri-environmental schemes have been implemented in the past decade ( Dobbs & Pretty 2004 ), though their success has been patchy ( Kleijn et al. 2001 ; Marggraf 2003 ; Carey et al. 2005 ; Feehan et al. 2005 ; Herzog et al. 2005 ; Meyer-Aurich 2005 ).

A good example of a carefully designed and integrated programme comes from China ( Li Wenhua 2001 ). In March 1994, the government published a White Paper to set out its plan for implementation of Agenda 21 and put forward ecological farming, known as ‘Shengtai Nongye’ or agroecological engineering, as the approach to achieve sustainability in agriculture. Pilot projects have been established in 2000 townships and villages spread across 150 counties. Policy for these ‘eco-counties’ is organized through a cross-ministry partnership, which uses a variety of incentives to encourage adoption of diverse production systems to replace monocultures. These include subsidies and loans, technical assistance, tax exemptions and deductions, security of land tenure, marketing services and linkages to research organizations. These eco-counties contain some 12 Mha of land, approximately half of which is cropland, and though only covering a relatively small part of China's total agricultural land, do illustrate what is possible when policy is appropriately coordinated.

Many countries now have national policies that now advocate export-led agricultural development. Access to international markets is clearly important for poorer countries, and successful competition for market share can be a very significant source of foreign exchange. However, this approach has some drawbacks: (i) poor countries are in competition with one another for market share, and so there is likely to be a downward pressure on prices, which reduces returns over time unless productivity continues to increase, (ii) markets for agri-food products are fickle, and can be rapidly undermined by alternative products or threats (e.g. avian bird flu and the collapse of the Thai poultry sector), (iii) distant markets are less sensitive to the potential negative externalities of agricultural production and are rarely pro-poor (with the exception of fair-trade products and efforts by some food companies; Smith 2008 ), and (iv) smallholders have many difficulties in accessing international markets and market information.

More importantly, an export-led approach can seem to ignore the in-country opportunities for agricultural development focused on local and regional markets. Agricultural policies with both sustainability and poverty reduction aims should adopt a multi-track approach that emphasizes five components: (i) small farmer development linked to local markets, (ii) agri-business development—both small businesses and export-led, (iii) agro-processing and value-added activities to ensure that returns are maximized in-country, (iv) urban agriculture, as many urban people rely on small-scale urban food production that rarely appears in national statistics, and (v) livestock development to meet local increases in demand for meat (predicted to increase as economies become richer). In industrialized countries, however, it is perverse subsidies that still promote harm to the environment ( Myers & Kent 2003 ), though agricultural reforms are now putting into place systems that pay for the provision of environmental services and the development of multifunctional agriculture ( Kenkel & Manning 1999 ; Terwan et al. 2004 ; Shennan et al. 2005 ; Scherr & McNeely 2008 ; Kesavan & Swaminathan 2008 ; Shennan 2008 ).

Like all major changes, transitions towards sustainability can also provoke secondary problems. For example, building a road near a forest can not only help farmers reach food markets, but also aid illegal timber extraction. If land has to be closed off to grazing for rehabilitation, then people with no other source of feed may have to sell their livestock; and if cropping intensity increases or new lands are taken into cultivation, then the burden of increased workloads may fall particularly on women. Producers of current agrochemical products are likely to suffer market losses from a more limited role for their products. The increase in assets that could come from sustainable livelihoods based on sustainable agriculture may simply increase the incentives for more powerful interests to take over. In addition, with benefits weighted towards the future while requiring current costs, this may leave poor farmers unable to adopt novel technologies, while richer farmers in industrialized countries are being paid to make the changes ( Lee 2005 ; Tripp 2006 ).

New winners and losers will emerge with the widespread adoption of sustainable agriculture. A differentiated approach for agricultural policies will thus become increasingly necessary if agroecosystems are to become more productive while reducing negative impacts on the environment, thus improving efficiency ( Dobbs & Pretty 2004 ; Lee 2005 ; Wilkins 2008 ). This will require wider attention to exchange rate policies, trade reforms, domestic agricultural prices, input subsidies, labour market reforms, education and investment in schools, rural infrastructure, secure property rights to water and land, development of institutions for resource management and substantial investments in agricultural research and extension. At the same time, the environmental costs of transporting food are increasing, and in some countries are greater than the costs arising from food production on farms, suggesting that sustainability priorities need to be set for whole food chains ( Pretty et al. 2005 ; Smith 2008 ).

In this context, it is unclear whether progress towards more sustainable agricultural systems will result in enough food to meet the current food needs in developing countries, let alone the future needs after continued population growth (and changed consumption patterns) and adoption of more urban and meat-rich diets ( Popkin 1998 ). But what is occurring should be cause for cautious optimism, particularly as evidence indicates that productivity can grow over time if natural, social and human assets are accumulated.

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Climate change resilient agricultural practices: A learning experience from indigenous communities over India

Affiliation South Asian Forum for Environment, India

* E-mail: [email protected] , [email protected]

Affiliation Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Lausanne, Switzerland

• Amitava Aich, 
• Dipayan Dey, 
• Arindam Roy

Published: July 28, 2022

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000022
• Reader Comments

The impact of climate change on agricultural practices is raising question marks on future food security of billions of people in tropical and subtropical regions. Recently introduced, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) techniques encourage the practices of sustainable agriculture, increasing adaptive capacity and resilience to shocks at multiple levels. However, it is extremely difficult to develop a single framework for climate change resilient agricultural practices for different agrarian production landscape. Agriculture accounts for nearly 30% of Indian gross domestic product (GDP) and provide livelihood of nearly two-thirds of the population of the country. Due to the major dependency on rain-fed irrigation, Indian agriculture is vulnerable to rainfall anomaly, pest invasion, and extreme climate events. Due to their close relationship with environment and resources, indigenous people are considered as one of the most vulnerable community affected by the changing climate. In the milieu of the climate emergency, multiple indigenous tribes from different agroecological zones over India have been selected in the present study to explore the adaptive potential of indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK)-based agricultural practices against climate change. The selected tribes are inhabitants of Eastern Himalaya (Apatani), Western Himalaya (Lahaulas), Eastern Ghat (Dongria-Gondh), and Western Ghat (Irular) representing rainforest, cold desert, moist upland, and rain shadow landscape, respectively. The effect of climate change over the respective regions was identified using different Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario, and agricultural practices resilient to climate change were quantified. Primary results indicated moderate to extreme susceptibility and preparedness of the tribes against climate change due to the exceptionally adaptive ITK-based agricultural practices. A brief policy has been prepared where knowledge exchange and technology transfer among the indigenous tribes have been suggested to achieve complete climate change resiliency.

Citation: Aich A, Dey D, Roy A (2022) Climate change resilient agricultural practices: A learning experience from indigenous communities over India. PLOS Sustain Transform 1(7): e0000022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000022

Editor: Ashwani Kumar, Dr. H.S. Gour Central University, INDIA

Copyright: © 2022 Aich et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1 Introduction

Traditional agricultural systems provide sustenance and livelihood to more than 1 billion people [ 1 – 3 ]. They often integrate soil, water, plant, and animal management at a landscape scale, creating mosaics of different land uses. These landscape mosaics, some of which have existed for hundreds of years, are maintained by local communities through practices based on traditional knowledge accumulated over generations [ 4 ]. Climate change threatens the livelihood of rural communities [ 5 ], often in combination with pressures coming from demographic change, insecure land tenure and resource rights, environmental degradation, market failures, inappropriate policies, and the erosion of local institutions [ 6 – 8 ]. Empowering local communities and combining farmers’ and external knowledge have been identified as some of the tools for meeting these challenges [ 9 ]. However, their experiences have received little attention in research and among policy makers [ 10 ].

Traditional agricultural landscapes as linked social–ecological systems (SESs), whose resilience is defined as consisting of 3 characteristics: the capacity to (i) absorb shocks and maintain function; (ii) self-organize; (iii) learn and adapt [ 11 ]. Resilience is not about an equilibrium of transformation and persistence. Instead, it explains how transformation and persistence work together, allowing living systems to assimilate disturbance, innovation, and change, while at the same time maintaining characteristic structures and processes [ 12 ]. Agriculture is one of the most sensitive systems influenced by changes in weather and climate patterns. In recent years, climate change impacts have been become the greatest threats to global food security [ 13 , 14 ]. Climate change results a decline in food production and consequently rising food prices [ 15 , 16 ]. Indigenous people are good observers of changes in weather and climate and acclimatize through several adaptive and mitigation strategies [ 17 , 18 ].

Traditional agroecosystems are receiving rising attention as sustainable alternatives to industrial farming [ 19 ]. They are getting increased considerations for biodiversity conservation and sustainable food production in changing climate [ 20 ]. Indigenous agriculture systems are diverse, adaptable, nature friendly, and productive [ 21 ]. Higher vegetation diversity in the form of crops and trees escalates the conversion of CO 2 to organic form and consequently reducing global warming [ 22 ]. Mixed cropping not only decreases the risk of crop failure, pest, and disease but also diversifies the food supply [ 23 ]. It is estimated that traditional multiple cropping systems provide 15% to 20% of the world’s food supply [ 1 ]. Agro-forestry, intercropping, crop rotation, cover cropping, traditional organic composting, and integrated crop-animal farming are prominent traditional agricultural practices [ 24 , 25 ].

Traditional agricultural landscapes refer to the landscapes with preserved traditional sustainable agricultural practices and conserved biodiversity [ 26 , 27 ]. They are appreciated for their aesthetic, natural, cultural, historical, and socioeconomic values [ 28 ]. Since the beginning of agriculture, peasants have been continually adjusting their agriculture practices with change in climatic conditions [ 29 ]. Indigenous farmers have a long history of climate change adaptation through making changes in agriculture practices [ 30 ]. Indigenous farmers use several techniques to reduce climate-driven crop failure such as use of drought-tolerant local varieties, polyculture, agro-forestry, water harvesting, and conserving soil [ 31 – 33 ]. Indigenous peasants use various natural indicators to forecast the weather patterns such as changes in the behavior of local flora and fauna [ 34 , 35 ].

The climate-smart agriculture (CSA) approach [ 36 ] has 3 objectives: (i) sustainably enhancing agricultural productivity to support equitable increase in income, food security, and development; (ii) increasing adaptive capacity and resilience to shocks at multiple levels, from farm to national; and (iii) reducing Green House Gases (GHG) emissions and increasing carbon sequestration where possible. Indigenous peoples, whose livelihood activities are most respectful of nature and the environment, suffer immediately, directly, and disproportionately from climate change and its consequences. Indigenous livelihood systems, which are closely linked to access to land and natural resources, are often vulnerable to environmental degradation and climate change, especially as many inhabit economically and politically marginal areas in fragile ecosystems in the countries likely to be worst affected by climate change [ 25 ]. The livelihood of many indigenous and local communities, in particular, will be adversely affected if climate and associated land-use change lead to losses in biodiversity. Indigenous peoples in Asia are particularly vulnerable to changing weather conditions resulting from climate change, including unprecedented strength of typhoons and cyclones and long droughts and prolonged floods [ 15 ]. Communities report worsening food and water insecurity, increases in water- and vector-borne diseases, pest invasion, destruction of traditional livelihoods of indigenous peoples, and cultural ethnocide or destruction of indigenous cultures that are linked with nature and agricultural cycles [ 37 ].

The Indian region is one of the world’s 8 centres of crop plant origin and diversity with 166 food/crop species and 320 wild relatives of crops have originated here (Dr R.S. Rana, personal communication). India has 700 recorded tribal groups with population of 104 million as per 2011 census [ 38 ] and many of them practicing diverse indigenous farming techniques to suit the needs of various respective ecoclimatic zones. The present study has been designed as a literature-based analytical review of such practices among 4 different ethnic groups in 4 different agroclimatic and geographical zones of India, viz, the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh, the Dongria Kondh of Niamgiri hills of Odisha, the Irular in the Nilgiris, and the Lahaulas of Himachal Pradesh to evaluating the following objectives: (i) exploring comparatively the various indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK)-based farming practices in the different agroclimatic regions; (ii) climate resiliency of those practices; and (iii) recommending policy guidelines.

2 Methodology

2.1 systematic review of literature.

An inventory of various publications in the last 30 years on the agro biodiversity, ethno botany, traditional knowledge, indigenous farming practices, and land use techniques of 4 different tribes of India in 4 different agroclimatic and geographical zones viz, the Apatanis of Arunachal Pradesh, the Dongria Kondh of Niamgiri hills of Odisha, the Irular in the Nilgiris, and the Lahaulas of Himachal Pradesh has been done based on key word topic searches in journal repositories like Google Scholar. A small but significant pool of led and pioneering works has been identified, category, or subtopics are developed most striking observations noted.

2.2 Understanding traditional practices and climate resiliency

The most striking traditional agricultural practices of the 4 major tribes were noted. A comparative analysis of different climate resilient traditional practices of the 4 types were made based on existing information available via literature survey. Effects of imminent dangers of possible extreme events and impact of climate change on these 4 tribes were estimated based on existing facts and figures. A heat map representing climate change resiliency of these indigenous tribes has been developed using R-programming language, and finally, a reshaping policy framework for technology transfers and knowledge sharing among the tribes for successfully helping them to achieve climate resiliency has been suggested.

2.3 Study area

Four different agroclimatic zones and 4 different indigenous groups were chosen for this particular study. The Apatanis live in the small plateau called Zero valley ( Fig 1 ) surrounded by forested mountains of Eastern Himalaya in the Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh. It is located at 27.63° N, 93.83° E at an altitude ranging between 1,688 m to 2,438 m. Rainfall is heavy and can be up to 400 mm in monsoon months. Temperature varies from moderate in summer to very cold in the winter months. Their approximate population is around 12,806 (as per 2011 census), and Tibetan and Ahom sources indicate that they have been inhabiting the area from at least the 15th century and probably much earlier ( https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5893/ ).

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

The base map is prepared using QGIS software.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000022.g001

The Lahaulas are the inhabitants of Lahaul valley ( Fig 1 ) that is located in the western Himalayan region of Lahaul and Spiti and lies between the Pir Panjal in the south and Zanskar in the north. It is located between 76° 46′ and 78° 41′ east longitudes and between 31° 44′ and 32° 59′ north altitudes. The Lahaul valley receives scanty rainfalls, almost nil in summer, and its only source of moisture is snow during the winter. Temperature is generally cold. The combined population of Lahaul and Spiti is 31,564 (as per 2011 census).

The Dongria Kondh is one of the officially designated primitive tribal group (PTG) in the Eastern Ghat region of the state Orissa. They are the original inhabitants of Niyamgiri hilly region ( Fig 1 ) that extends to Rayagada, Koraput, and Kalahandi districts of south Orissa. Dongria Kondhs have an estimated population of about 10,000 and are distributed in around 120 settlements, all at an altitude up to 1,500 above the sea level [ 39 ]. It is located between 190 26′ to 190 43′ N latitude and 830 18′ to 830 28′ E longitudes with a maximum elevation of 1,516 meters. The Niyamgiri hill range abounds with streams. More than 100 streams flows from the Niyamgiri hills and 36 streams originate from Niyamgiri plateau (just below the Niyam Raja), and most of the streams are perennial. Niyamgiri hills have been receiving high rainfall since centuries and drought is unheard of in this area.

The Irular tribes inhabit the Palamalai hills and Nilgiris of Western Ghats ( Fig 1 ). Their total population may be 200,000 (as per 2011 census). The Palamali Hills is situated in the Salem district of Tamil Nadu, lies between 11° 14.46′ and 12° 53.30′ north latitude and between 77° 32.52′ to 78° 35.05′ east longitude. It is located 1,839 m from the mean sea level (MSL) and more over the climate of the district is whole dry except north east monsoon seasons [ 40 , 41 ]. Nilgiri district is hilly, lying at an elevation of 1,000 to 2,600 m above MSL and divided between the Nilgiri plateau and the lower, smaller Wayanad plateau. The district lies at the juncture of the Western Ghats and the Eastern Ghats. Its latitudinal and longitudinal location is 130 km (latitude: 11° 12 N to 11° 37 N) by 185 km (longitude 76° 30 E to 76° 55 E). It has cooler and wetter climate with high average rainfall.

3 Results and discussion

3.1 indigenous agricultural practices in 4 different agro-biodiversity hotspots.

Previous literatures on the agricultural practices of indigenous people in 4 distinct agro-biodiversity hotspots did not necessarily focus on climate resilient agriculture. The authors of these studies had elaborately discussed about the agro-biodiversity, farming techniques, current scenario, and economical sustainability in past and present context of socioecological paradigm. However, no studies have been found to address direct climate change resiliency of traditional indigenous agricultural practices over Indian subcontinent to the best of our knowledge. The following section will primarily focus on the agricultural practices of indigenous tribes and how they can be applied on current eco-agricultural scenario in the milieu of climate change over different agricultural macroenvironments in the world.

3.1.1 Apatani tribes (Eastern Himalaya).

The Apatanis practice both wet and terrace cultivation and paddy cum fish culture with finger millet on the bund (small dam). Due to these special attributes of sustainable farming systems and people’s traditional ecological knowledge in sustaining ecosystems, the plateau is in the process of declaring as World Heritage centre [ 42 – 44 ]. The Apatanis have developed age-old valley rice cultivation has often been counted to be one of the advanced tribal communities in the northeastern region of India [ 45 ]. It has been known for its rich economy for decades and has good knowledge of land, forest, and water management [ 46 ]. The wet rice fields are irrigated through well-managed canal systems [ 47 ]. It is managed by diverting numerous streams originated in the forest into single canal and through canal each agriculture field is connected with bamboo or pinewood pipe.

The entire cultivation procedure by the Apatani tribes are organic and devoid of artificial soil supplements. The paddy-cum-fish agroecosystem are positioned strategically to receive all the run off nutrients from the hills and in addition to that, regular appliance of livestock manure, agricultural waste, kitchen waste, and rice chaff help to maintain soil fertility [ 48 ]. Irrigation, cultivation, and harvesting of paddy-cum-fish agricultural system require cooperation, experience, contingency plans, and discipline work schedule. Apatani tribes have organized tasks like construction and maintenance of irrigation, fencing, footpath along the field, weeding, field preparation, transplantation, harvesting, and storing. They are done by the different groups of farmers and supervised by community leaders (Gaon Burha/Panchayat body). Scientific and place-based irrigation solution using locally produced materials, innovative paddy-cum-fish aquaculture, community participation in collective farming, and maintaining agro-biodiversity through regular usage of indigenous landraces have potentially distinguished the Apatani tribes in the context of agro-biodiversity regime on mountainous landscape.

3.1.2 Lahaula (Western Himalaya).

The Lahaul tribe has maintained a considerable agro-biodiversity and livestock altogether characterizing high level of germ plasm conservation [ 49 ]. Lahaulas living in the cold desert region of Lahaul valley are facultative farmers as they able to cultivate only for 6 months (June to November) as the region remained ice covered during the other 6 months of the year. Despite of the extreme weather conditions, Lahaulas are able to maintain high level of agro-biodiversity through ice-water harvesting, combinatorial cultivation of traditional and cash crops, and mixed agriculture–livestock practices. Indigenous practices for efficient use of water resources in such cold arid environment with steep slopes are distinctive. Earthen channels (Nullah or Kuhi) for tapping melting snow water are used for irrigation. Channel length run anywhere from a few meters to more than 5 km. Ridges and furrows transverse to the slope retard water flow and soil loss [ 50 ]. Leaching of soil nutrients due to the heavy snow cover gradually turns the fertile soil into unproductive one [ 51 ]. The requirement of high quantity organic manure is met through composting livestock manure, night soil, kitchen waste, and forest leaf litter in a specially designed community composting room. On the advent of summer, compost materials are taken into the field for improving the soil quality.

Domesticated Yaks ( Bos grunniens ) is crossed with local cows to produce cold tolerant offspring of several intermediate species like Gari, Laru, Bree, and Gee for drought power and sources of protein. Nitrogen fixing trees like Seabuckthrone ( Hippophae rhamnoides ) are also cultivated along with the crops to meet the fuels and fodder requires for the long winter period. Crop rotation is a common practice among the Lahaulas. Domesticated wild crop, local variety, and cash crops are rotated to ensure the soil fertility and maintaining the agro-biodiversity. Herbs and indigenous medicinal plants are cultivated simultaneously with food crops and cash crop to maximize the farm output. A combinatorial agro-forestry and agro-livestock approach of the Lahaulas have successfully able to generate sufficient revenue and food to sustain 6 months of snow-covered winter in the lap of western Himalayan high-altitude landscape. This also helps to maintain the local agro-biodiversity of the immensely important ecoregion.

3.1.3 Dongria Kondh (Eastern Ghat).

Dongria Kondh tribes, living at the semiarid hilly range of Eastern Ghats, have been applying sustainable agro-forestry techniques and a unique mixed crop system for several centuries since their establishment in the tropical dry deciduous hilly forest ecoregion. The forest is a source for 18 different non-timber forest products like mushroom, bamboo, fruits, vegetables, seeds, leaf, grass, and medicinal products. The Kondh people sustainably uses the forest natural capital such a way that maintain the natural stock and simultaneously ensure the constant flow of products. Around 70% of the resources have been consumed by the tribes, whereas 30% of the resources are being sold to generate revenue for further economic and agro-forest sustainability [ 52 ]. The tribe faces moderate to acute food grain crisis during the post-sowing monsoon period and they completely rely upon different alternative food products from the forest. The system has been running flawlessly until recent time due to the aggressive mining activity, natural resources depleted significantly, and the food security have been compromised [ 53 ].

However, the Kondh farmer have developed a very interesting agrarian technique where they simultaneously grow 80 varieties of different crops ranging from paddy, millet, leaves, pulses, tubers, vegetables, sorghum, legumes, maize, oil-seeds, etc. [ 54 ]. In order to grow so many crops in 1 dongor (the traditional farm lands of Dongria Kondhs on lower hill slopes), the sowing period and harvesting period extends up to 5 months from April till the end of August and from October to February basing upon climatic suitability, respectively.

Genomic profiling of millets like finger millet, pearl millet, and sorghum suggest that they are climate-smart grain crops ideal for environments prone to drought and extreme heat [ 55 ]. Even the traditional upland paddy varieties they use are less water consuming, so are resilient to drought-like conditions, and are harvested between 60 and 90 days of sowing. As a result, the possibility of complete failure of a staple food crop like millets and upland paddy grown in a dongor is very low even in drought-like conditions [ 56 ].

The entire agricultural method is extremely organic in nature and devoid of any chemical pesticide, which reduces the cost of farming and at the same time help to maintain environmental sustainability [ 57 ].

3.1.4 Irular tribes (Western Ghat).

Irulas or Irular tribes, inhabiting at the Palamalai mountainous region of Western Ghats and also Nilgiri hills are practicing 3 crucial age-old traditional agricultural techniques, i.e., indigenous pest management, traditional seed and food storage methods, and age-old experiences and thumb rules on weather prediction. Similar to the Kondh tribes, Irular tribes also practice mixed agriculture. Due to the high humidity in the region, the tribes have developed and rigorously practices storage distinct methods for crops, vegetables, and seeds. Eleven different techniques for preserving seeds and crops by the Irular tribes are recorded till now. They store pepper seeds by sun drying for 2 to 3 days and then store in the gunny bags over the platform made of bamboo sticks to avoid termite attack. Paddy grains are stored with locally grown aromatic herbs ( Vitex negundo and Pongamia pinnata ) leaves in a small mud-house. Millets are buried under the soil (painted with cow dung slurry) and can be stored up to 1 year. Their storage structure specially designed to allow aeration protect insect and rodent infestation [ 58 ]. Traditional knowledge of cross-breeding and selection helps the Irular enhancing the genetic potential of the crops and maintaining indigenous lines of drought resistant, pest tolerant, disease resistant sorghum, millet, and ragi [ 59 , 60 ].

Irular tribes are also good observer of nature and pass the traditional knowledge of weather phenomenon linked with biological activity or atmospheric condition. Irular use the behavioral fluctuation of dragonfly, termites, ants, and sheep to predict the possibility of rainfall. Atmospheric phenomenon like ring around the moon, rainbow in the evening, and morning cloudiness are considered as positive indicator of rainfall, whereas dense fog is considered as negative indicator. The Irular tribes also possess and practice traditional knowledge on climate, weather, forecasting, and rainfall prediction [ 58 ]. The Irular tribes also gained extensive knowledge in pest management as 16 different plant-based pesticides have been documented that are all completely biological in nature. The mode of actions of these indigenous pesticides includes anti-repellent, anti-feedent, stomach poison, growth inhibitor, and contact poisoning. All of these pesticides are prepared from common Indian plants extract like neem, chili, tobacco, babul, etc.

The weather prediction thumb rules are not being validated with real measurement till now but understanding of the effect of forecasting in regional weather and climate pattern in agricultural practices along with biological pest control practices and seed conservation have made Irular tribe unique in the context of global agro-biodiversity conservation.

3.2 Climate change risk in indigenous agricultural landscape

The effect of climate change over the argo-ecological landscape of Lahaul valley indicates high temperature stress as increment of number of warm days, 0.16°C average temperature and 1.1 to 2.5°C maximum temperature are observed in last decades [ 61 , 62 ]. Decreasing trend of rainfall during monsoon and increasing trend of consecutive dry days in last several decades strongly suggest future water stress in the abovementioned region over western Himalaya. Studies on the western Himalayan region suggest presence of climate anomaly like retraction of glaciers, decreasing number of snowfall days, increasing incident of pest attack, and extreme events on western Himalayan region [ 63 – 65 ].

Apatani tribes in eastern Himalayan landscape are also experiencing warmer weather with 0.2°C increment in maximum and minimum temperature [ 66 ]. Although no significant trend in rainfall amount has been observed, however 11% decrease in rainy day and 5% to 15% decrease in rainfall amount by 2030 was speculated using regional climate model [ 67 ]. Increasing frequency of extreme weather events like flashfloods, cloudburst, landslide, etc. and pathogen attack in agricultural field will affect the sustainable agro-forest landscape of Apatani tribes. Similar to the Apatani and Lahaulas tribes, Irular and Dongria Kondh tribes are also facing climate change effect via increase in maximum and minimum temperature and decrease in rainfall and increasing possibility of extreme weather event [ 68 , 69 ]. In addition, the increasing number of forest fire events in the region is also an emerging problem due to the dryer climate [ 70 ].

Higher atmospheric and soil temperature in the crop growing season have direct impact on plant physiological processes and therefore has a declining effect on crop productivity, seedling mortality, and pollen viability [ 71 ]. Anomaly in precipitation amount and pattern also affect crop development by reducing plant growth [ 72 ]. Extreme events like drought and flood could alter soil fertility, reduce water holding capacity, increase nutrient run off, and negatively impact seed and crop production [ 73 ]. Agricultural pest attack increases at higher temperature as it elevates their food consumption capability and reproduction rate [ 74 ].

3.3 Climate resiliency through indigenous agro-forestry

Three major climate-resilient and environmentally friendly approaches in all 4 tribes can broadly classified as (i) organic farming; (ii) soil and water conservation and community farming; and (iii) maintain local agro-biodiversity. The practices under these 3 regimes have been listed in Table 1 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000022.t001

Human and animal excreta, plant residue, ashes, decomposed straw, husk, and other by-products are used to make organic fertilizer and compost material that helps to maintain soil fertility in the extreme orographic landscape with high run-off. Community farming begins with division of labour and have produced different highly specialized skilled individual expert in different farming techniques. It needs to be remembered that studied tribes live in an area with complex topological feature and far from advance technological/logistical support. Farming in such region is extremely labour intensive, and therefore, community farming has become essential for surviving. All 4 tribes have maintained their indigenous land races of different crops, cereal, vegetables, millets, oil-seeds, etc. that give rises to very high agro-biodiversity in all 4 regions. For example, Apatanis cultivate 106 species of plants with 16 landraces of indigenous rice and 4 landraces of indigenous millet [ 75 ]. Similarly, 24 different crops, vegetables, and medicinal plants are cultivated by the Lahaulas, and 50 different indigenous landraces are cultivated by Irular and Dongria Kondh tribes.

The combination of organic firming and high indigenous agro-biodiversity create a perfect opportunity for biological control of pests. Therefore, other than Irular tribe, all 3 tribes depend upon natural predator like birds and spiders, feeding on the indigenous crop, for predation of pests. Irular tribes developed multiple organic pest management methods from extract of different common Indian plants. Apatani and Lahaulas incorporate fish and livestock into their agricultural practices, respectively, to create a circular approach to maximize the utilization of waste material produced. At a complex topographic high-altitude landscape where nutrient run-off is very high, the practices of growing plants with animals also help to maintain soil fertility. Four major stresses due to the advancement of climate change have been identified in previous section, and climate change resiliency against these stresses has been graphically presented in Fig 2 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000022.g002

Retraction of the glaciers and direct physiological impact on the livestock due to the temperature stress have made the agricultural practices of the Lahaula’s vulnerable to climate change. However, Irular and Dongria Kondh tribes are resilient to the temperature stress due to their heat-resistant local agricultural landraces, and Apatanis will remain unaffected due to their temperate climate and vast forest cover. Dongria Kondh tribe will successfully tackle the water stress due to their low-water farming techniques and simultaneous cultivation of multiple crops that help to retain the soil moisture by reducing evaporation. Hundreds of perennial streams of Nyamgiri hills are also sustainably maintained and utilised by the Dongria Kondhs along with the forests, which gives them enough subsistence in form of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). However, although Apatani and Lahuala tribe extensively reuse and recirculate water in their field but due to the higher water requirement of paddy-cum-fish and paddy-cum-livestock agriculture, resiliency would be little less compared to Dongria Kondh.

Presence of vast forest cover, very well-structured irrigation system, contour agriculture and layered agricultural field have provided resiliency to the Apatani’s from extreme events like flash flood, landslides, and cloud burst. Due to their seed protection practices and weather prediction abilities, Irular tribe also show resiliency to the extreme events. However, forest fire and flash flood risk in both Eastern Ghat and Western Ghat have been increased and vegetation has significantly decreased in recent past. High risk of flash flood, land slide, avalanches, and very low vegetation coverage have made the Lahaulas extremely vulnerable to extreme events. Robust pest control methods of Irular tribe and age-old practices of intercropping, mixed cropping, and sequence cropping of the Dongria Kondh tribe will resist pest attack in near future.

3.4 Reshaping policy

Temperature stress, water stress, alien pest attack, and increasing risk of extreme events are pointed out as the major risks in the above described 4 indigenous tribes. However, every tribe has shown their own climate resiliency in their traditional agrarian practices, and therefore, a technology transfers and knowledge sharing among the tribes would successfully help to achieve the climate resilient closure. The policy outcome may be summarizing as follows:

• Designing, structuring and monitoring of infrastructural network of Apatani and Lahaul tribes (made by bamboo in case of Apatanis and Pine wood and stones in case of Lahaulas) for waster harvesting should be more rugged and durable to resilient against increasing risk of flash flood and cloud burst events.
• Water recycling techniques like bunds, ridges, and furrow used by Apatani and Lahaul tribes could be adopted by Irular and Dongria Kondh tribes as Nilgiri and Koraput region will face extreme water stress in coming decades.
• Simultaneous cultivation of multiple crops by the Dongria Kondh tribe could be acclimated by the other 3 tribes as this practice is not only drought resistance but also able to maximize the food security of the population.
• Germplasm storage and organic pest management knowledge by the Irular tribes could be transferred to the other 3 tribes to tackle the post-extreme event situations and alien pest attack, respectively.
• Overall, it is strongly recommended that the indigenous knowledge of agricultural practices needs to be conserved. Government and educational institutions need to focus on harvesting the traditional knowledge by the indigenous community.

3.5 Limitation

One of the major limitations of the study is lack of significant number of quantifiable literature/research articles about indigenous agricultural practices over Indian subcontinent. No direct study assessing risk of climate change among the targeted agroecological landscapes has been found to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, the current study integrates socioeconomic status of indigenous agrarian sustainability and probable climate change risk in the present milieu of climate emergency of 21st century. Uncertainty in the current climate models and the spatiotemporal resolution of its output is also a minor limitation as the study theoretically correlate and proposed reshaped policy by using the current and future modeled agro-meteorological parameters.

4. Conclusions

In the present study, an in-depth analysis of CSA practices among the 4 indigenous tribes spanning across different agro-biodiversity hotspots over India was done, and it was observed that every indigenous community is more or less resilient to the adverse effect of climate change on agriculture. Thousands years of traditional knowledge has helped to develop a unique resistance against climate change among the tribes. However, the practices are not well explored through the eyes of modern scientific perspective, and therefore, might goes extinct through the course of time. A country-wide study on the existing indigenous CSA practices is extremely important to produce a database and implementation framework that will successfully help to resist the climate change effect on agrarian economy of tropical countries. Perhaps the most relevant aspect of the study is the realization that economically and socially backward farmers cope with and even prepare for climate change by minimizing crop failure through increased use of drought tolerant local varieties, water harvesting, mixed cropping, agro-forestry, soil conservation practices, and a series of other traditional techniques.

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• Open access
• Published: 15 March 2022

Effects of sustainable agricultural practices on farm income and food security in northern Ghana

• Edinam Dope Setsoafia   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7213-8920 1 ,
• Wanglin Ma 1 &
• Alan Renwick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7847-8459 1  

Agricultural and Food Economics volume  10 , Article number:  9 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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The adoption of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) has been recommended by many experts and international institutions to address food security and climate change problems. Global support for the Sustainable Development Goals has focused attention on efforts to up-scale the adoption of SAPs in developing countries where growth in populations and incomes compromises the resilience of natural resources. This study investigates the factors affecting smallholder farmers’ decisions to adopt SAPs (improved seed, fertilizer, and soil and water conservation) and the impacts of the adoption on farm income and food security, using data collected from Ghana. Food security is captured by the reduced coping strategy index and household dietary diversity. The multinomial endogenous switching regression model is utilized to address selection bias issues. Results show that farmers’ decisions to adopt SAPs are influenced by the social demographics of the households, plot-level characteristics, extension services and locations. Adopting all three SAPs has larger positive impacts on farm income and food security than adopting single or two SAPs. Our findings advocate for policies that enhance the quality of extension service and strengthen farmer-based organizations for the wider dissemination of adequate SAP information. Farmers should be encouraged to adopt SAPs as a comprehensive package for increasing farm income and ensuring food security.

Introduction

There is considerable pressure on agriculture to meet the demands of a growing world population. This is heightened with rising demand for necessities such as food, raw materials for industries, and biofuels. However, growth in agricultural production globally does not match this demand well, especially in parts of Africa. Africa has been projected to be vulnerable to climate change because of its proximity to the equator (Ojo et al. 2021 ; Thinda et al. 2021 ; Sarr et al. 2021 ; Onyeneke 2021 ; Ahmed 2022 ). Some of the physical impacts of climate change in Africa are rising sea levels, temperature andchange, and rainfall change (World Bank 2010 ; Abdulai 2018 ), which will harm agricultural productivity, farm income, food security, and economic development. This will negatively affect the poor, whose livelihoods are tired of agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa.

There has been a global discussion on overcoming the negative externalities of climate change. Most experts believe that sustainable agriculture management could be a solution to the challenge associated with climate change (Kassie et al. 2013 ; Ndiritu et al. 2014 ; Ogemah 2017 ; Zhou et al. 2018 ; Adenle et al. 2019 ; Rose et al. 2019 ; Zeweld et al. 2020 ; Ma and Wang 2020 ; Ehiakpor et al. 2021 ; Bekele et al. 2021 ). This approach is expected to improve agricultural production performance whilst reversing the negative degradation processes on the agroecosystem, particularly in smallholder farming systems. It is an upgrade of the green revolution, which led to a significant increase in agricultural productivity globally and is credited for jump-starting economies in Asia out of poverty but has left negative externalities such as deforestation, land degradation, salinization of water bodies, and loss of biodiversity in its wake.

To reverse the negative externalities from crop intensification, farmers have been advised to adopt sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs), which are made up of elements of the green revolution and an agronomic revolution. The literature is filled with studies on the adoption of specific or single elements of SAPs, such as improved seed, irrigation, drought-tolerant crop varieties, climate-resilient crop variety, organic soil amendments, and soil and water conservation practices, and their effects on crop yield and net farm income (Abdulai and Huffman 2014 ; Agula et al. 2018 ; Adenle et al. 2019 ; Adegbeye et al. 2020 ; Kimathi et al. 2021 ; Zheng et al. 2021 ; Ahmed 2022 ; Yang et al. 2022 ). Despite the potential complementarity or substitutability of specific elements of SAPs, the research on the adoption of multiple SAPs and their effects on outcome variables such as income, outputs, consumption expenditure and food security remains limited.

This paper seeks to investigate the determinants of multiple SAP adoption and the adoption effects on farm income and food security, using second-hand data collected from Ghana. This study contributes to the literature in twofold. First, it provides empirical insights into the importance of SAPs on welfare indicators, specifically food security. The use of food security as a proxy measure for welfare is particularly important in the Ghanaian context, where farming is done mostly on a subsistence level, and farmers sell crops as and when they need cash. Thus, farmers may be food secure but not have a high net farm income or high consumption expenditure. Our analysis extends previous studies that have focused on other proxies of household welfare such as net farm income, net crop income and consumption expenditure (Kassie et al. 2013 ; Teklewold et al. 2013a ; Manda et al. 2016 ; Bopp et al. 2019 ; Oyetunde Usman et al. 2020 ; Ehiakpor et al. 2021 ). Secondly, we employ a multinomial endogenous switching regression model to mitigate selection bias. In particular, this model helps address the selection bias issues arising from observed factors (e.g., age, gender and education) and unobserved factors (farmers’ innate ability in innovation adoption and motivations to address external shocks). Findings from the study will aid in formulating specific policies targeted at improving SAP adoption and enhancing the food security status of farm households in developing countries.

The remaining sections of the paper are as follows; " Literature review " section covers a review of relevant literature. The methodology is presented in " Methodology " section. The descriptive and empirical results are presented and discussed in " Results and discussions " section. The final section highlights the conclusions and policy implications of the findings.

Literature review

A growing number of studies have explored the factors that determine the adoption of SAPs in Africa. In the past, most of the works have focused on single components of SAPs (Abdulai and Huffman 2014 ; Carrión Yaguana et al. 2015 ; Fisher et al. 2015 ; Adenle et al. 2019 ; Manda et al. 2020a ; Martey et al. 2020 ; Kimathi et al. 2021 ; Lampteym 2022 ). For example, Abdulai and Huffman ( 2014 ) reported that rice farmers’ decisions to adopt soil and water conservation are influenced by their education, capital and labour constraints, social networks, extension contacts, and farm soil conditions. Manda et al. ( 2018 ) found that farmers’ decisions to adopt improved maize varieties are mainly influenced by education, household size, livestock holdings, land per capita, market information, and locations in Zambia. The study by Martey et al. ( 2020 ) reveals that farmers’ adoption of drought-tolerant maize varieties is mainly determined by access to seed, gender, access to extension, labour availability and location of the farmer in Ghana. Kimathi et al. ( 2021 ) investigated farmers’ decisions to adopt climate-resilient potato varieties and found that the main factors affecting adoption were access to information, quality seeds, training, group membership and variations in agro-ecological zones.

Some studies have also explored the factors affecting smallholder farmers’ decisions to adopt multiple SAPs. Most of the past works have been focused on Eastern and Southern Africa (Teklewold et al. 2013a ; Kassie et al. 2015 ; Cecchini et al. 2016 ; Bese et al. 2021 ; Nonvide 2021 ), though a growing number of studies seek to bridge the research gap in the adoption of multiple SAPs in West Africa (Nkegbe and Shankar 2014 ; Struik et al. 2014 ; Ehiakpor et al. 2021 ; Faye et al. 2021 ). The multiple SAPs considered by Teklewold et al. ( 2013a ) include maize–legume rotation, conservation tillage, animal manure use, improved seed, and inorganic fertiliser use. They showed that a household’s trust in government support, credit constraints, spouse education, rainfall and plot-level disturbances, household wealth, social capital and networks, labour availability, plot and market access are the main factors determining both the probability and the extent of adoption of SAPs in rural Ethiopia. In their investigation for Ghana, the multiple SAPs considered by Ehiakpor et al. ( 2021 ) include improved maize seeds, maize-legume rotation, animal manure, legume intercropping, crop residue retention, zero/minimum tillage, integrated pest management, and chemical fertilizer. Non-farm income, livestock ownership, pest and disease prevalence, farmers’ experience of erosion, farmers’ perception of poor soil fertility, participation in field demonstration, membership of saving groups, access to agricultural credit, plot ownership, and distance to the agricultural input market are found to be important determinants of adoption of SAPs (Ehiakpor et al. 2021 ).

Studies estimating the impacts of SAP have utilized various outcome variables, such as household income, agrochemical use, demand for labour, crop yields, food security (Teklewold et al. 2013b ; Abdulai and Huffman 2014 ; Gebremariam and Wünscher 2016 ; Manda et al. 2016 ; Amondo et al. 2019 ; Marenya et al. 2020 ; Oduniyi and Chagwiza 2021 ). Gebremariam and Wünscher ( 2016 ) found that higher combinations of SAPs led to higher payoff measured by net crop income and consumption expenditure in Ghana. Khonje et al. ( 2018 ) showed that joint adoption of multiple SAPs had higher impacts on yields, household income and poverty than the adoption of components of the technology package in Zambia. Amondo et al. ( 2019 ) found that adopting drought-tolerant maize varieties increases maize yield by 15% in Zambia. Marenya et al. ( 2020 ) concluded that a higher number of SAPs adopted resulted in higher maize grain yield and maize income in Ethiopia. The adoption of elements of SAPs has been said to be context-specific because there are no blueprints of the various combination of SAPs that work in every environment. Therefore, this study explores how SAP adoption affects farm income and food security, using Ghana as a case.

Methodology

Smallholder farmers make decisions to adopt SAPs in response to external shocks such as drought, erosion, perceived decline in soil fertility, weeds, pests, and diseases. Both observed factors (e.g., age, gender, education and farm size) and unobserved factors (e.g., farmers’ innate abilities and motivations) may affect their decisions when choosing to adopt a single SAP or a package (Kassie et al. 2013 ; Teklewold et al. 2013a ; Manda et al. 2016 ; Ehiakpor et al. 2021 ). Due to the self-selection nature of technology adoption, farmers without adopting any SAPs and those adopting a single SAP or package may be systematically different. The fact results in a selection bias issue, which should be addressed for consistently estimating the effects of SAP adoption.

When technology adoption has more than two options, previous studies have used either the multi-valued treatment effects (MVT) model (Cattaneo 2010 ; Ma et al. 2021 ; Czyżewski et al. 2022 ) or the multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model (Kassie et al. 2015 ; Oparinde 2021 ; Ahmed 2022 ) to address the selection bias issues. For example,Czyżewski et al. ( 2022 ) estimated the long-term impacts of political orientation (economic views and individual value systems) on the environment using the MVT model. They confirmed that local orientation is conducive to long-term environmental care. Using the MESR model, Ahmed ( 2022 ) evaluated the impact of improved maize varieties and inorganic fertilizer on productivity and wellbeing. He found that combining the two technologies significantly boosts maize yield and consumption expenditure than adopting the technologies in isolation. Because of the non-parametric nature, the MVT model can only address the observed selection bias and does not account for unobserved section bias. In comparison, the MESR model can help mitigate selection bias issues arising from both observed and unobserved factors, and thus, it is employed in this study.

Multinomial endogenous switching regression

The MESR model estimate three stages. The first stage models factors affecting smallholder farmers’ decisions to adopt a specific SAP technology or a package. Following Teklewold et al. ( 2013a ), this study focuses on three main SAP technologies, namely improved seeds (I), fertilizer (F), and soil and water conservation (cereal-legume rotation/cereal – legume intercropping, manure use, organic input use) (S). The three categories result in eight possible choices of SAPs. It bears an emphasis here that because of the small number of observations in the group that captures the combination of improved seed and fertilizer (26 samples) and the group that captures the combination of improved seed and soil and water conservation (9 samples), we combined them in empirical estimations. Also, it is worth noting here that no household has only adopted improved seed. These facts indicate that there are six mutually exclusive choices of SAP technology, including (1) non-adoption (I 0 F 0 S 0 ); (2) fertilizer only (I 0 F 1 S 0 ); (3) soil and water conservation only (I 0 F 0 S 1 ); (4) combination of improved seed and fertilizer and combination of improved seed and soil and water conservation (I 1 F 1 S 0 ); (5) combination of fertilizer and soil and water conservation (I 0 F 1 S 1 ); (6) combination of improved seed, fertilizer, and soil and water conservation (I 1 F 1 S 1 ). Farmers choose one of the six possible choices to maximize the expected benefit.

The study assumes that the error terms are identical and independently Gumbel distributed, the probability that farmer i , with X characteristics will choose package j, is specified using a multinomial logit model (McFadden 1973 ; Teklewold et al. 2013a ; Zhou et al. 2020 ; Ma et al. 2022b ). It is specified as follows:

where P ij represents the probability that a farmer i chooses to adopt SAP technology j. X i is a vector of observed exogenous variables that capture household, plot, and location-level characteristics. β j is a vector of parameters to be estimated. The maximum likelihood estimation is used to estimate the parameters of the latent variable model.

In the second stage, the ordinary least square (OLS) model is used to establish the relationship between the outcome variables (farm income and food security) and a set of exogenous variables denoted by Z for the chosen SAP technology. Non-adoption of SAPs (i.e., base category, I 0 F 0 S 0 ) is denoted as j  = 1, with the other combinations denoted as ( j  = 2 …, 6). The possible equations for each regime is specified as:

where I is an index that denotes farmer i ’s choice of adopting a type of SAP technology; Q i is the outcome variables for the i- th farmer; Z i is a vector of exogenous variables; α 1 and α J are parameters to be estimated; u i 1 and u iJ are the error terms.

Relying on a vector of observed covariates, captured by Z i , Eqs. (2a) and (2b) can help address the observed selection bias issue. However, if the same unobserved factors (e.g., farmers’ motivations to adopt SAPs) simultaneously influence farmers’ decisions to adopt SAPs and outcome variables, the error terms in Eqs. (2a) and (2b) and the error term in Eq. ( 1 ) would be correlated. In this case, unobserved selection bias occurs. Failing to address such type of selection bias would generate biased estimates. Within the MESR framework, the selectivity correction terms are calculated after estimating Eq. ( 1 ) and then included into Eqs. (2a) and (2b) to mitigate unobserved selection bias. Formally, Eqs. (2a) and (2b) can be rewritten as follows:

where Q i and Z i are defined earlier; λ 1 and λ J are selectivity correction terms used to address unobserved selection bias issues; σ 1 and σ J are covariance between error terms in Eqs. ( 1 ), (2a) and (2b). In the multinomial choice setting, there are J  − 1 selectivity-correction terms, one for each alternative SAP combination.

For consistently estimating the MESR model, at least one instrumental variable (IV) should be included in X i in the MNL model but not in the Z i in the outcome equations. In this study, two distance variables, distance to weekly market and minutes 30 to the plot, are employed as IVs for model identification purposes. Distance to the weekly market is measured as a continuous variable, measured in minutes. The variable representing minutes 30 to plot is a dummy variable, which equals 1 if the plot is within 30 min from the homestead and 0 otherwise. The two IVs are not expected to affect farm income and food security directly. We checked the validity of the IVs by running the Falsification test and conducting the correlation coefficient analysis (Pizer 2016 ; Liu et al. 2021 ; Ma et al. 2022a ). For the sake of simplicity, we did not report the results.

The average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) is calculated at the third step. This involves comparing the expected outcomes (farm income and food security) of SAP adopters and non-adopters, with and without adoption. Using experimental data, it is easier to establish impacts; however, this study is based on observational cross-sectional data, thus making impact evaluation a bit challenging. The challenge is mainly estimating the counterfactual outcome, i.e. the outcome of SAP adopters if they had not adopted the SAP technology. Following previous studies (Kassie et al. 2015 ; Oparinde 2021 ; Ahmed 2022 ), the study estimates ATT in the actual and the counterfactual scenarios using the following equations:

The outcome variables for SAP adopters with adoption (observed):

The outcome variables for SAP adopters had they decided not to adopt (Counterfactual):

The difference between Eqs. (4a) and (5a) or Eqs. (4b) and (5b) is the ATT. For example, the difference between Eqs. (4a) and (5a) is given as:

Data and variables

The study used data collected by IITA for their Africa RISING project ( https://africa-rising.net/ ) in the three northern regions, namely, Northern, Upper East, and Upper West regions. The data was collected in 2014 from 1284 households operating approximately 5500 plots in 50 rural communities in northern Ghana. The baseline survey used a stratified two-stage sampling technique, and data was collected using Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) supported by Survey CTO software on tablets (Tinonin et al. 2016 ). A structured questionnaire was used to conduct the household interviews. The data covers the various SAP technologies, demographic characteristics, agricultural land holdings, crop outputs and sales, livestock production, farmers’ access to agricultural information and knowledge, access to credit and markets, household assets, and income.

The outcome variables for this study are farm income and food security. The farm income of crops cultivated is obtained by valuing the yield of crops at market price and deducting the costs of all variable inputs. Two variables capture food security, including reduced coping strategy index (rCSI) and household dietary diversity (HDD). Specifically, the rCSI is an index that is measured by scoring coping strategies households use (and frequency of use) when they experience food insecurity. rCSI is an index with five standardized questions on the coping strategies used when faced with food insecurity, the more strategies used, and food insecure the household is. The rCSI score ranges from 0 to 63. A higher level of rCSI score means a higher level of food insecurity. The HDD variable is based on the diverse food groups a household consumes. The higher the score, the more diverse the diet of a household, and the more food secure the household is. Drawing upon previous empirical studies on the adoption of SAPs and related agricultural innovations (Kassie et al. 2013 ; Teklewold et al. 2013a ; Manda et al. 2016 ; Bopp et al. 2019 ; Oyetunde Usman et al. 2020 ; Ma and Wang 2020 ; Ehiakpor et al. 2021 ; Pham et al. 2021 ), we have identified and selected a range of control variables that may influence the adoption of SAPs. These include age, gender, education, marital status, household size, farm size, off-farm income, Africa RISING member, extension, extension satisfaction, number of crops, drought and floods, market access, sandy soil, clay soil, flat slope, moderate to steep, and location dummies.

Results and discussions

Descriptive results.

Table 1 shows the frequency of respondents that used the different categories of SAPs. Of the eight possible categories of SAPs initially specified, 6.78% of farmers in our sample did not adopt any SAPs (I 0 F 0 S 0 ). No farmers adopted imported seed only (I 1 F 0 S 0 ), while only 9 farmers combined improved seed and soil and water conversation as SAPs (I 1 F 0 S 1 ). Only 26 farmers combined improved seed and soil and water conservation as SAPs (I 1 F 1 S 0 ). Therefore, as discussed earlier, we merged I 1 F 1 S 0 and I 1 F 0 S 1 into one group (coded as I 1 F 1 S 0 ), and the empirical analysis includes six groups in total. Table 1 also shows that more than half of the farmers in our sample (51.17%) combined fertilizer and soil and water conservation as SAPs. Around 7% of farmers adopted all the three identified SAPs.

Table 2 presents the variables and statistical descriptions. It shows that the average farm income is 2561 GHS (roughly 400 USD). The average means of rCSI and HDD, which capture food security, are 5.576 and 7.799, respectively. Table 2 also shows that the average age of respondents was about 48 years. Around 84% of respondents are male, and almost 90% of respondents got married. The surveyed households averagely have around 9 persons. About 61% of respondents received advice from extension officers, and 45.6% were satisfied with the extension services. Approximately 70% of respondents had accessed the markets.

Empirical results

Determinants of adoption of sap categories.

Table 3 presents the results estimated by the MNL model, demonstrating the factors that influence smallholder farmers’ decisions to adopt different SAPs categories. Farmers without adopting any type of SAPs (i.e. I 0 F 0 S 0 ) are used as the reference group in empirical estimations. Because the primary objective of the MNL model estimations is to calculate the selectivity correction terms rather than explain the determinants of SAP adoption perfectly, we explain the results of Table 3 briefly. The results show gender variable has significant coefficients in columns 2, 4 and 5. Our results appear to suggest that women are more likely to combine improved seeds and fertilizer (I 1 F 1 S 0 ) as SAPs to increase farm productivity. In comparison, men are more likely to rely on fertilizer (I 0 F 1 S 0 ) or combine fertilizer and soil and water conservation technology ( I 0 F 1 S 1 ) as SAPs to improve farm performance. Our findings are largely supported by the previous studies (Smale et al. 2018 ; Paudel et al. 2020 ; Tambo et al. 2021 ), reporting gendered differences in agricultural technology adoption. For example, Smale et al. ( 2018 ) found that women are more likely to adopt improved seeds on the plots they manage in Sudan. Education has positive impacts in all estimated specifications but is only statistically significant in the specification of adopting improved seed and fertilizer (I 1 F 1 S 0 ). Better education enables farmers to be aware of the benefits of SAPs and motivate them to adopt them, especially productivity-enhancing technologies such as improved seed and fertilizer. This finding is consistent with the findings of Kassie et al. ( 2014 ) for Tanzania and Gebremariam and Wünscher ( 2016 ) for Ghana.

The significant coefficients of household size in columns 2 and 6 suggest that larger households are more likely to adopt multiple SAPs (I 1 F 1 S 1 ) but are less likely to adopt single SAP such as fertilizer (I 0 F 1 S 0 ). Larger households usually mean better labour endowments, allowing them to adopt multiple SAPs more easily than small ones. This is consistent with the findings of Kassie et al. ( 2014 ). Off-farm income has positive and significant coefficients in columns 3, 5 and 6. The findings suggest that farmers receiving a higher level of off-farm income are more likely to adopt fertilizer only (I 0 F 1 S 0 ), combine fertilizer and soil and water conservation as SAPs (I 0 F 1 S 1 ), and adopt all three SAPs (I 1 F 1 S 1 ). Additional income from off-farm activities can help release credit constraint issues, allowing farmers to invest in innovative technologies such as SAPs to improve farm performance. In their study for Pakistan, Kousar and Abdulai ( 2016 ) found that participation in off-farm work increases farmers’ adoption of soil conservation measures.

The African RISING member variable has a positive and statistically significant impact on farmers’ fertiliser adoption only (I 0 F 1 S 0 ), the combination of improved seed and fertilizer (I 1 F 1 S 0 ), and the combination of fertilizer and soil and water conservation (I 0 F 1 S 1 ). The importance of farmer-based organisations in promoting the adoption of innovative technologies has been widely discussed in the literature (Zhang et al. 2020 ; Manda et al. 2020b ; Yu et al. 2021 ). For example, Manda et al. ( 2020a , b ) reported that membership in agricultural cooperatives increases the adoption speed of improved maize by 1.6–4.3 years. We show that farmers having access to extension services are more likely to adopt SAPs, including fertilizer only (I 0 F 1 S 0 ), soil and water conservation only (I 0 F 0 S 1 ), and all three SAps (I 1 F 1 S 1 ). In their studies for Nepal, Suvedi et al. ( 2017 ) found that farmers’ participation in extension programs increases their adoption of improved crop varieties. This finding is further confirmed by Nakano et al. ( 2018 ), who found that farmer-to-farmer training through extension programs enhance farmers’ adoption of technologies (e.g., fertilizer and improved bund) in Tanzania. The location dummies are statistically significant in columns 2, 4 and 5. Our findings suggest that relative to farmers living in Upper West (reference group), those residing in Northern and Upper East are more likely to adopt fertilizer only (I 0 F 1 S 0 ) and a combination of fertilizer and soil and water conservation (I 0 F 1 S 1 ), but less likely to adopt the combination of improved seeds and fertilizer (I 1 F 1 S 0 ). Our findings confirm spatial-fixed characteristics (e.g., social-economic conditions, resource endowments, climate conditions, and institutional arrangements) may also affect smallholder farmers’ decisions to adopt SAPs and highlight the importance of including them in estimations.

Average treatment effects of SAPs

Table 4 presents the results estimating the treatment effects of SAP adoption on farm income and food security. For the sake of brevity, we do not present and discuss the results estimated by the OLS regression model but are available upon reasonable requests. Our ATT estimate results in Table 4 record differentiated findings regarding the impacts of adopting only one SAP technology on farm income and food security, measured by rCSI score and HDD score. Specifically, adopting only fertilizer (I 0 F 1 S 0 ) significantly reduces rCSI score and improves HDD score. The ATT estimates indicate that fertilizer adoption only (I 0 F 1 S 0 ) decreases rCSI score by 42% and increases the HDD score by 6.5%. We find that fertilizer adoption only (I 0 F 1 S 0 ) decreases farm income. A possible reason could be the improper use of fertilizer by smallholder farmers, such as using lower than recommended amounts of fertilizer; hence they do not achieve the maximum potential output expected.

Adoption of SAP package that combines improved seed and fertilizer (I 1 F 1 S 0 ) improves food security significantly. The ATT estimates show that I 1 F 1 S 0 adoption reduces rCSI score by 45% and increases HDD score by 4%. However, I 1 F 1 S 0 adoption decreases farm income, a finding that is largely consistent with the finding of Ma and Wang ( 2020 ), showing that SAP adoption significantly decreases farm income in China. Adoption of SAP package that combines fertilizer and soil and water conservation (I 0 F 1 S 1 ) increases farm income and improves food security. We show that I 0 F 1 S 1 adoption increases farm income by 12%, reduces rCSI score by 23%, and improves HDD score by 5%.

The ATT estimates show that adopting all the three SAPs (I 1 F 1 S 1 ) positively and statistically impacts farm income and food security. The impact magnitudes of adopting all the three SAPs are larger than that of adopting single or two SAPs. Specifically, the I 1 F 1 S 1 adoption increases farm income by 23%, reduces rCSI score by 53%, and improves HDD score by 14%. Our results are largely supported by the previous studies (Teklewold et al. 2013a ; Manda et al. 2016 ; Oduniyi and Chagwiza 2021 ), pointing out that adopting multiple SAPs has larger impacts on welfare measures than adopting only one or two SAPs. For example, Teklewold et al. ( 2013b ) showed that multiple SAP adoption significantly increases household income in Ethiopia. Oduniyi and Chagwiza ( 2021 ) found that adopting sustainable land management practices increases the food security of smallholder farmers in South Africa.

Conclusions and policy implications

Many institutions have credited sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) as a viable solution that helps tackle the worlds’ feeding problems and worsening environmental issues. This study used a multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) to investigate factors that affect smallholder farmers’ decisions to adopt different categories of SAPs and estimate the effects of the adoption on farm income and food security. In particular, we used two measures, including rCSI score and HDD score, to capture food security. We estimated the data collected by IITA for their Africa RISING project in Ghana.

The MNL results showed that farmers’ decisions to adopt SAPs are influenced by the social demographics of the households (e.g., gender, education, marital status, and household size), plot-level characteristics (e.g., number of crops, soil types, and topography), extension services, and locations. The study also recorded differentiated findings regarding the impacts of adopting only one or two SAPs on farm income and food security. For example, adopting only fertilizer significantly reduces rCSI score and improves HDD score, but it unexpectedly decreases farm income. Adoption of SAP package that combines improved seed and fertilizer significantly improves food security measures, but it also decreases farm income. Nevertheless, we found that adopting all the three SAPs positively and statistically impacts farm income and food security. The impact magnitudes of adopting all the three SAPs are larger than that of adopting single or two SAPs.

The study highlights that policies that improve the extension agents to farmer ratio should be pursued since access to extension positively influenced the adoption of SAPs. The satisfaction with the extension agent variable positively influenced the adoption of all the SAPs. This highlights the need to improve the quality of extension service to minimize the risk of adoption due to inadequate information transfer. Membership in farmer-based organizations (FBOs) such as Africa RISING positively influenced the adoption of different packages of SAPs. Therefore farmers should be encouraged to join FBOs, and similar organizations should be established or strengthened to enhance the dissemination of information regarding SAPs. Policies to improve farmer income and food security should advocate for the comprehensive adoption of all the SAPs packages and provide incentives to motivate the adoption of all SAPs packages.

Availability of data and materials

Data is available from the leading author upon the reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from NZAID scholarship from MFAT and Lincoln university research fund. We want to thank IITA and IFPRI for making the data from the Africa RISING Project readily accessible. We also want to thank Dr. Gideon Danso-Abbeam for his helpful comments and suggestions.

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Setsoafia, E.D., Ma, W. & Renwick, A. Effects of sustainable agricultural practices on farm income and food security in northern Ghana. Agric Econ 10 , 9 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40100-022-00216-9

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Participatory research for sustainable agriculture: the case of the Italian agroecological rice network

• Elena Pagliarino   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6140-3856 1 ,
• Francesca Orlando 2 ,
• Valentina Vaglia 2 ,
• Secondo Rolfo 1 &
• Stefano Bocchi 2  

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Since the Green Revolution, worldwide agriculture has been characterized by a typical top–down approach. The degree of autonomy, creativity, and responsibility of farmers has been limited by the continuous external inputs of chemicals, machinery, advice, subsidies and knowledge.

The issue of sustainability has brought complexity and uncertainty to this mainly linear process of innovation, steering agriculture toward alternative models. Agroecology represents an innovative paradigm of agriculture in which external inputs are minimized, and the assets of the farm are greatly valued. Agroecological production relies on the farmers’ direct management of resources and on their active engagement in the agricultural knowledge and innovation system.

This paper focuses on the experience of a group of farmers, scientists, public officials, and managers of private companies who are experimenting with agroecology in rice production in one of the most intensively farmed, profitable and environmentally sensitive areas of Italy. The partnership regularly comes together to discuss agricultural techniques and results, needs, and paths of innovation; in addition, it stimulates and takes part in research projects, following a participatory process based on co-learning and mutual responsibility. By using ethnographic methods such as direct observations and in-depth interviews, our work may contribute to understanding the role of participatory research in sustainable agriculture and what makes for good participation.

Introduction

The traditional model of innovation and its failings.

From the so-called Green Revolution, started in the 1950s, to the current period of innovations based on digital devices, worldwide agriculture has been characterized by a typical top–down transfer of technology. In this pervasive paradigm, technology is developed in the controlled environment of universities and research stations, passed on to agricultural advisors and then to farmers, who consume and apply it ([ 18 ]: 67). Technology is perceived as a commodity delivered to farmers, who have little control over its development and management [ 22 ]. The transferred technologies are uniform, standardized, and mass-produced to work almost everywhere. Standardization is applied not only to physical technologies, such as seeds, pesticides, and machinery, but also to procedures and their sequencing, with the aim of routinizing the activities of farmers, thus promoting predictable and manageable changes in rural areas ([ 18 ]: 71). Some feedback is provided by the extension agents, who turn the problems of the farmers into researchable questions, then answered by research scientists. Nevertheless, the innovation pipeline is mainly linear and one-way [ 82 ].

This system has improved the availability and quality of food per capita, ensuring food security in many areas of the world [ 72 ], and it has been a powerful tool for the diffusion of industrial agriculture [ 81 ].

While this traditional model is still practiced in many areas, its shortcomings have long been acknowledged. The reliance of farmers on suppliers of technologies, capital to buy such technologies and experts’ knowledge to be able to use them has grown, limiting their margins of autonomy and creativity in farming decisions. They have also lost control over essential resources due to the concentration of power in the mechanical, seed, chemical, processing, and distribution industries. With the introduction of advanced techniques, such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, precision agriculture, sensors, satellites, and robotics, innovation has become increasingly sophisticated and its development even more disconnected from farmers.

Chambers, Pretty and other practitioners of the “farmer first” discourse [ 16 , 17 , 77 , 78 ] have highlighted the failure of this model in developing countries and resource-poor areas, which are more risk-prone and characterized by more complex and less controllable local conditions than the areas where the technologies and practices were actually developed.

The challenge of sustainability, posed first by the Report of the Club of Rome in 1972 and then by the Brundtland Report in 1987 and the Rio Declaration in 1992, started to be perceived as an issue only at the end of the last century [ 91 ], when it brought complexity to intensive agriculture, practiced in more developed countries. The issue of sustainability has brought to the fore the concepts of risk and uncertainty also in European agriculture. Risk and uncertainty are critical matters in agriculture and, therefore, their impact on both learning and practice needs to be taken into account. Dealing with environmental risks and developing innovations to address these risks require more inclusive ways of knowing and doing, as noted by Pimbert ([ 75 ]: 22), who stated that “more inclusive ways of knowing are required to bring together the partial and incomplete perspectives of different actors faced with uncertainty, diversity and change”. This is the reason why the participatory research approach has been incorporated into European agricultural research, increasingly oriented toward the challenge of sustainability, albeit lagging behind other sectors (for example, ecosystem management, which started soon after the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21, in 1992).

Criticism of the mechanistic process of innovation has extended to all farming systems, while a broad consensus has emerged on the links between conventional agriculture and its top–down innovation, on the one hand, and the environmental crisis, on the other hand.

The agroecological paradigm based on participation

Agroecology has been proposed as a radical alternative to the Green Revolution [ 1 , 2 , 38 , 87 , 94 ]. It represents an innovative paradigm of agriculture in which external inputs are minimized, and great value is attached to the internal resources of the farm and the territory. A systemic ecological approach is adopted in order to understand the relations between living organisms and their environment. This fosters the processes that move the agroecosystem closer to a natural, mature, relatively stable, and self-sustaining ecosystem, able to maintain productivity without external inputs [ 37 ].

Our work does not explore the issue of agroecology seen as a social movement but focuses exclusively on agroecology as a system of knowledge and innovation. In this meaning, agroecological production relies on the farmers’ direct management of resources and on their engagement in the governance of the agricultural knowledge and innovation system. Proponents of agroecology as an alternative development model argue that its potential can only be realized through participatory research and extension [ 16 , 83 , 84 , 94 , 96 ]. Cuéllar-Padilla and Calle-Collado [ 22 ] define agroecology as “the practice of science with people” and stress that participation is at the core of any single process. Agroecology implies the promotion of practices that (i) fit the local contexts in which they are implemented, (ii) foster the autonomy and skills of the communities involved (as is the case with the participatory research network discussed in our case study, whose learning and empowerment processes are presented in Section 3.2), (iii) profit from locally-produced resources, included local opinions regarding sustainability ( Ibidem ).

A young male farmer of our network explains: “It is a question of development model. So, if we choose a development model that favors indistinct, undifferentiated production—a commodity, as it is called—this leads to cost increases. The progressive increase in costs combines with stagnation in terms of value generated by the production. To deal with decreasing revenues, one must increase the surface area. This model breaks up the farming community because the land is a finite good. If ten farmers work this land today but the model forces me to expand, some farms will grow but some others will inevitably disappear. This is entrepreneurial desertification in farming. Conversely, the organic agriculture model restores the intrinsic value of what it produces because it qualifies it and, mind you, it is not a matter of profiting excessively, of setting prices that consumers can’t afford, the question is how to redistribute wealth along the production chain. Thanks to the organic system, I do this work and contribute to increasing the biodiversity of the local farming businesses.”

Agroecological research requires local-scale and action-oriented solutions to deal with technical and ecological aspects, as well as economic and sociocultural dimensions, adopting a holistic perspective on agricultural management. The research approach needs to integrate scientific and empirical knowledge throughout the process, achieving the co-production of new cross-cultural innovation [ 15 , 36 , 73 ].

A university professor of the network explains: “In traditional agronomic research, we are limited to comparing fertilizers and antiparasitic agents. We decontextualize, we only look at parcels, we compare in increasing doses, we add a witness, we add replications, we use well-documented and refined statistics, we publish, and then we entrust the best technique to the extension service. The best result obtained on the parcel must necessarily also be the best result on the farm. In case of failure, we put the blame on the farmer. This is the game. Impact is not assessed, indirect effects are not considered, especially on a territorial scale. But wasn’t agronomy born along with agriculture? Agronomy is life, creativity, the daily toil of those who work the land, it is not exclusively science. The real challenge lies in complexity. But all the actors have to be involved. It might seem like a longer path, but it is actually much shorter. It is the theory of interconnections, of evolution not based on competition but rather on cooperation.”

A male farmer says: “Farmers are researchers by nature, but with a great limitation: they don’t bother taking notes. They are not interested in writing, so they don’t bother publishing the discoveries coming from their ability to adapt during agronomy activities. In the network, instead, we had to do this. We had to take notes and then discuss them with the others, even the professors, on an equal footing.”

The European Commission has explicitly encouraged the transition to sustainable farming through interactive innovation and multi-actor approaches since 2012 [ 28 ], when the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI) and its Operational Groups were launched within the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Multi-actor projects and bottom-up thematic networks were also designed within the Horizon 2020 research and development (R&D) framework program. The common principle was to bring together innovation actors: farmers, advisers, researchers, businesses, NGOs, and others. The collaboration among them was supposed to make the best use of complementary types of knowledge, so as to achieve the co-creation and diffusion of solutions and opportunities that would be readily implementable in practice.

In Italy, the Ministry of Agricultural Policies [ 62 ] expressed its intention to support participatory and multi-actor projects in Action 10 of the National Strategic Plan for the Development of the Organic System, emphasising the importance of knowledge sharing, co-research and co-innovation through the involvement of various stakeholders, starting from the initial phases of research. In the call for R&D projects in organic agriculture at the end of 2018, these goals were actively pursued by requiring researchers who wished to receive financial support to include at least one farmer among their research partners and by rewarding those researchers who involved more than one farmer (Ministerial Decree no. 67374/2018).

Participatory networks have multiplied in recent years, activated as part of projects, on the basis of public co-financing. Their diffusion is strengthened by the supporting environment, that is, by the facilitation, coordination, and training processes implemented [ 34 ]. Yet, facilitating dialogue between researchers and farmers is still a priority, which will be pursued in European agricultural policy after 2020 [ 26 ].

Mansuri and Rao [ 55 ] warn that “induced” participation—that is, participation promoted through bureaucratically managed research and development interventions—requires a fundamentally different approach, one that is long-term, context sensitive, and committed to developing a culture of learning by doing. This is why it is particularly interesting to study the experience of a spontaneous, self-directed, and fairly informal, yet highly functional network that seems to be a unique case in the Italian agricultural sector.

What is true participation?

The term “participatory research” is used to refer to various approaches and methods, and it encompasses different types of participation. A systematic review of thirty-five experiences of participatory processes, with the involvement of farmers, concluded that farmers are too often considered a mere source of information to be used by researchers rather than active participants in the management and transformation of rural areas [ 57 ].

As for participatory methods, many authors stress the importance of research mechanisms and designs to bring together scientific and practical knowledge [ 22 , 35 , 50 , 56 , 65 , 99 ]. Successful participatory research, it is argued, can be achieved through a structured dialogue in which the dialectical process is encouraged by regular meetings, joint reflection, and the collective development of findings and conclusions. Nevertheless, the review by Menconi et al. [ 57 ] shows that there is no preferred scheme: every initiative has its own methods and practices and is tailor-made on the researchers’ preferences, resources, context, and project. However, simplicity of approach seems to be the best quality of any participatory activity ( Ibidem ).

As for the attitude and behavior of researchers regarding participation, the literature indicates a widespread lack of awareness, interest, time, incentives, and recognition by the current research system (e.g., [ 13 , 25 , 70 ]). Agricultural scientists have been put under growing pressure to undertake participatory research, but they do not have sufficient practice, skills, and competencies ( Ibidem ). Several authors have suggested blending various forms and intensities of stakeholders’ participation with formal agricultural research (e.g., [ 52 ]), “uniting science and participation” [ 76 ], into “compromised participation” [ 12 ], making things even more difficult in terms of designing, implementing, and monitoring participatory research.

Finally, in addition to the discussion around what participation is, some authors have questioned its very value, raising the issues of inclusion, power, and governance of participation [ 20 , 43 , 44 , 55 , 63 ].

Despite continuous attention paid to the topic, there is no consensus as to what participation means, how widespread it is, whether it is a sufficient goal in sustainable agriculture, and the extent to which it is actually inclusive.

Here, the experience of an Italian network for participatory research in agroecological rice production is presented with the aim to contribute to such ongoing debate. This paper focuses on the role of participatory research in the transition to sustainable agriculture, trying to shed light on if and why it is needed and what makes for good participation.

Study context: the difficult conversion to organic farming of the rice district in Northern Italy

Italy is the leading European producer of rice [ 31 ]. The crop is grown mainly in Northern Italy, mostly in the regions of Piedmont and Lombardy, where a rich, well-organized, and interconnected district comprises farms, processing and distribution businesses, research centers and extension services, and suppliers of chemicals, seeds, and machinery [ 14 ].

The cultivation is typically intensive monoculture, without crop rotation and with heavy chemical inputs, such as fertilizers and pesticides. The impact of rice growing on the environment tends to be considered very high, especially in terms of quality of soil and surface and ground water, with risks to human health posed by drinking contaminated water [ 45 ]. The transition to organic rice farming is perceived as a solution to ensure environmental protection, economic sustainability of the farms, consumer safety, and as a measure to mitigate climate change [ 41 , 80 ].

In Italy, organic farming is regarded as the most advanced and efficient way to develop an agroecological approach [ 68 ], and the discipline of agroecology finds concrete application in organic production, regardless of whether it is certified and remunerated on the market [ 98 ]. Hence, in the remainder of this study, the concepts of agroecology and organic farming will be used interchangeably.

The principles and approaches that should be adopted to manage organic farming systems are shown in European Commission (EC) Regulation 848/2018 (art. 6 and Annex II) [ 29 ]: limiting the use of non-renewable resources and external inputs, prohibiting the use of any product for weeding purposes, also of natural origin, and minimizing the use of organic fertilizers and pesticides, through measures to enhance soil life and its natural fertility (i.e., nourishing plants primarily through the soil ecosystem) and to prevent damage by pests and weeds, choosing appropriate resistant genotypes and crop rotation, and mechanical or physical methods. Therefore, the principles and approaches underlying organic agriculture are in line with the agroecological view of farming systems, although agroecology involves a wider approach, not limited to agronomic aspects, that overcomes any labels and certification systems. Agroecology aims not only to realize low-input farming systems, based on the exploitation of natural processes, but it also focuses on social–economical aspects, such as those related to human value, knowledge sharing, and equality in power distribution among the actors of the food supply chain. It is also true that, besides their principles, the regulations for organic agriculture allow the use of external products (EC Regulation 889/2008 [ 27 ]), which should be useful during the first period of transition to achieve a balance within the agroecosystem. However, in the real life of farms, this is often interpreted in a misleading way, and organic farming could follow the “input substitution approach” by replacing inputs permitted in conventional farming with others permitted in organic farming, which are not always very eco-friendly [ 51 , 60 , 61 ], without changing the underlying crop management approach.

Nevertheless, in our case study, organic agriculture is the basis upon which agroecological systems are generated. The organic rice farmers involved in the network are also agroecological farmers. They follow agroecological principles in relation to both (i) agronomic aspects (i.e., soil fertilization based on leguminous species and crop rotation, plant protection based on resistant genotypes, and the management of field flooding, innovative strategies for weeding without herbicides, as explained in [ 69 ]) and (ii) social aspects (i.e., group experience of knowledge sharing and mutual learning).

With the elimination of chemicals, the production of rice must be pursued through a complex process of varieties selection, crop rotation, and agronomic techniques to enhance soil and water resources and control weeds and pathogens, while also respecting the specificities of the territory. This work requires sophisticated know-how, experience, and skills that the Italian rice growers have long lost because they have been completely dependent on technology suppliers. The traditional research and advisory system is committed to ecological intensification but, due to the lack of specific funding dedicated to organic production, it has carried out few experiments on organic rice farming, mainly at the research station level [ 85 ]. The high costs of the innovative technologies developed, (e.g., mulch films and transplanting techniques, and the extreme variability of cropping systems)—depending on pedo-climatic conditions, field characteristics, and the business organization of farms—have prevented the dissemination of innovations beyond few farms. The spread of organic methods has taken place rather slowly, and organic rice production has remained niche, pursued only by a handful of pioneer farmers who, in the absence of prior knowledge, test innovative practices with a self-help and trial-and-error approach, as in Padel [ 71 ]. Organic rice cultivation was first adopted by farmers whose approach was seen as an “alternative” by the local agricultural community, i.e., biodynamic, macrobiotic, radical farmers motivated by strong environmental commitment, especially women. These farmers were initially treated with skepticism by their colleagues (as reported by [ 69 ]), sometimes even with suspicion and derision. However, their innovations were then taken up by a few pioneer farmers whose opinions are influential within the rice community, so that skepticism has now decreased, but it has not disappeared completely. This information derives from personal experiences reported by the farmers of the network. A female farmer of the network, for instance, explains that: “When the locals saw me do this work [Authors’ Note: manual work to avoid the use of herbicides], under the sun, with mosquitos all around… they thought me odd, they said: ‘that one has no brain’. That was another problem I had to deal with, being seen as a bit of an outsider. (…) It was very difficult. I struggled for many years. (…) I was heavily criticized because they saw that my business was earning much less than conventional farms—at the time, conventional farms were making good money—but I didn’t want to maximize profit, I wanted to maximize my personal expectations...”

In this context of difficult transition to organic farming, the multi-actor agroecological network analyzed here is carrying out participatory research and innovation to enhance organic methods. Exploring the values, motivations, processes, and relations of this Italian agroecological rice network is useful to understand if and how experiences of participatory research can change the trajectory of development in areas of intensive agriculture.

Our research explored the role and mechanisms of a participatory research network for the conversion to organic agriculture. We identified the following research goals:

To investigate learning processes and enabling environments;

To identify limits and opportunities of participatory research networks.

The questions that guided this study include:

Why did the farmers, researchers, and other actors join the participatory research network?

What and how do they learn within the participatory network?

Which are the limits and opportunities for the future of the network?

Methodology

This article draws on fieldwork investigating the partnership created by a group of farmers, scientists, government officials, and business managers in Northern Italy, between Lombardy and Piedmont, to research agroecological rice farming.

We integrate case study research and grounded theory, as in Andrade [ 4 ], choosing an interpretive approach [ 33 , 42 , 79 , 90 ]. We use qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviews and participant observations, constantly acknowledging the pedagogical model provided by Tracy [ 92 ] for quality issues. Twenty in-depth interviews were conducted, from January to November 2018, with the members of the network, using a biographical approach [ 66 , 89 ]. The interviews started by asking the respondents to tell their stories. They were invited to reflect on the origin and evolution of their professional experience, the moments of change and the time when they joined the network. They were also asked to say why they decided to participate in the network and to evaluate the consequences on their work and their expectations for the future. Spontaneous discussion, listening, and empathy were privileged throughout the process. The interviews were noted down, audio and video recorded with the interviewees’ permission, and later transcribed.

The functioning of the network and the relations among its members were directly observed during the partnership’s meetings, from September 2017 to December 2018. It was also possible to be involved in the informal exchange of messages among the participants via social networks and email.

Midgley [ 59 ] says that supporting evidence is often based on single case studies of intervention, and Meyer [ 54 ] points out the need to consider what is unique in each intervention. Our case study describes a small network of 28 people featuring farmers, researchers, and other actors. Other European networks have the same small number of participants, around thirty [ 40 ]. Therefore, the number of in-depth interviews (20), covering 70% of the network participants and integrated with the results of the observations made directly by the researchers during the network meetings over 16 months, appears reasonable and justifiable.

Objectives, methodologies, results, drivers of change, values, and visions were analyzed using grounded theory to develop an understanding of the processes of participation, assumption of responsibility, learning, and innovation. Grounded theory, in its latest evolution (e.g., [ 19 , 21 ]), is an interpretive method used to systematically analyze texts, such as interview transcripts and observation notes, in order to build theory concepts. This is done by reading the texts with specific questions in mind, extracting themes, and coding passages with keywords and quotes.

The narrative approach is used extensively in participatory social science, i.e., education, psychology, youth and childhood studies, geography, and land management science (for example, [ 86 ]). We found few applications in rural studies. In Phillips and Dickie [ 74 ], the narrative approach has been adopted to explore the rural future associated with climate change. Boxelaar et al. [ 10 ] explored how narrative approach can facilitate change in land management, demonstrating that this approach highlighted some of the ambiguities that existed within the project, but it did very little to change the course of the project. Kajamaa [ 47 ] shows that the narrative approach is appropriate to enrich participatory research when used in a complementary way to other ethnographic methods, such as in our case.

With the aim to explore which elements of the participatory research network support the transition to organic farming, the material was organized to fit into these categories:

Objectives, structure and functioning of the network;

Processes in the network;

Values shared;

Relations, power, and inclusion.

Results and discussion

The riso bio vero network.

The Riso Bio Vero (RBV) network brings together several organic rice farmers from the heart of the Italian rice district (provinces of Pavia, Vercelli, and Novara), as well as from outside this area. Scientists, public officials, and the managers of a company distributing organic products have also joined the network. The agricultural component of the group is not very representative of Italian farmers. According to the latest census of agriculture [ 46 ], in Italy, 30.7% of farmers are women, 2.5% are under 40, 6.2% are graduates, and only 0.8% have a degree in agriculture. In Europe [ 30 ], the first three figures are respectively: 28%, 11%, and 7.5%. In the RBV network, instead, women, young people, and graduates are well represented (respectively, 7 out of 17, 3 out of 17, and all) (Table 1 ).

The most recent data on the structure of European agriculture [ 30 ] suggest that, on average, 28% of farms across the EU are managed by women, with considerable differences among countries. In Lithuania and Latvia, nearly half of all the farms are managed by women; by contrast, in Finland, Malta, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, the proportion of female farm managers does not exceed 10%. Many studies demonstrate that participatory and agroecological approaches can be gender-sensitive, i.e., able to address the issues of gender inequality and inclusion (see for example, [ 39 , 67 ]).

Only 11% of all farm holdings in the European Union (EU) are run by farmers under 40 (6.9% by farmers younger than 35 and just 4.9% by women under the age of 35) [ 30 ], and persuading more young people to begin farming is a major challenge [ 5 ]. The EU is encouraging young people to take up farming with start-up grants, income support, and benefits, such as additional training ( Ibidem ). Flament and Macias [ 32 ] highlight that a growing number of urban youths, often with a university degree, are deciding to become farmers. Described as “new peasants”, many of them choose agroecology as an alternative way to enter the food system, promoting both social and environmental sustainability. The idea of young farmers being “innovative” and turning away from traditionally intensive industrial farming models was already promoted by de Rooij in 2004 [ 23 ].

On average, only 7.5% of the current generation of European farmers have received full agricultural training, and 73.5% only have practical agricultural skills, coming from professional experience. Among farm managers, educational attainment is lower among women than men (5% versus 10% for full agricultural training and 79% versus 68% for only practical training) [ 30 ].

The RBV network was established in 2016 thanks to the coming together of a group of people who, despite knowing one another, until then had only occasionally collaborated. The intensification of their relations was linked to the opportunity, offered by the University of Milan, to organize the second international conference on Organic Rice Production (ORP 2) in Milan, on the occasion of EXPO 2015, the Universal Exposition hosted by Italy and focusing on food and agriculture. The conference was very successful; teamwork was stimulating; and the goal of continuing to work more steadily together was reinforced. The people who took part in the organization of the conference felt that they had a common vision of their work and that together they could defend and enhance their activities, even against the harsh attacks suffered by the sector. At the end of 2014, in fact, a television reportage ( Report on the national TV channel Rai3) had revealed the phenomenon of “falsi bio” (false organic producers), triggering a crisis that affected the entire rice industry, both organic and conventional, and still persists. Attacks on the image of organic rice farming played a crucial role in the decision to establish the group called “Riso Bio Vero” (True Organic Rice) to affirm the integrity of a portion of organic rice growers and their firm condemnation of fake organic producers.

A young farmer of the network explains the “false bio” phenomenon in Italy by saying:

“We are 100% organic, which is a very important choice to give the business credibility. In 2014, I was among those who fought the hardest against the issue of fake organic rice. When I started the conversion, I saw that some of my competitors basically produced in the traditional way, but then all their papers were in order to obtain the certification. This is damaging to honest organic producers, consumers, as well as to conventional producers, who choose to follow the rules and don’t give in to the golden opportunity of making easy money. Unfair competition swallows up other businesses. Both conventional and organic farmers are wiped out by those who do not comply with the rules. In 2014, together with other farmers, I decided to expose this unacceptable situation. We did it, for example, by collaborating with Report (there were many other initiatives, but Report achieved the greatest visibility). We were involved in writing the episode of the program about this issue, which became a sort of turning point in Italy’s organic rice production and, to an extent, in the organic production of other sectors too. Before that, there were thousands of hectares of organic rice cultivation that were actually farmed in the conventional way. There was no crop rotation, the embankments had no vegetation—and I have never seen land remaining bare without undergoing treatment. Since Report , the history of organic farming has changed. From then on, there has been much more attention from the institutions, from politics, born of our denunciation, of our raising awareness and rebelling, of our will to redeem the sector, especially on the part of young farmers who can’t tolerate living in such a… how can I put this… such an unfair world.”

The group’s original core included ten organic rice farmers (four from Lombardy, five from Piedmont and one from Tuscany), a professor from the University of Milan, an official from the Lombardy Region, and a representative of a company distributing organic products. Afterwards, a retired official of the Piedmont Region and a professor from the University of Pavia also joined. Both academics made available to the network their research groups, made up of technicians and young researchers.

Thanks to the participation of the University of Milan in the Riso-Biosystems national project (2017-2019), two scientists from two different public research institutions joined the network too. Furthermore, the research activity became a specific work package of the project. Although it would be very interesting to analyze the relationships between the RBV network and the rest of the partnership and the level of integration achieved, such a topic is not the subject of this study.

Subsequently, some organic rice growers became members of the network either permanently (two farmers from Piedmont) or occasionally (farmers from Veneto).

The group was founded with the aim to demonstrate that organic rice can be produced in a serious way, without circumventing the limits imposed by European regulations, which forbid the use of chemicals. The group of pioneer farmers have come together to promote their common interests, i.e., demonstrating the methods and best practices at the basis of professional organic rice production. They are all officially certified organic farmers. However, their views go beyond any labels, because they believe in the agroecological approach, which regards the farm as a living system that interacts with the environment and the socio-political structure of the territory. For these reasons, they do not consider organic farming a mere sustainable alternative to conventional farming and aim to avoid products that are permitted by organic farming regulations but not environmentally friendly. They have also focused on exposing the strategies of fake organic rice producers, which circumvent the limits imposed by the European regulations forbidding the use of chemicals. Indeed, the rice sector is particular prone to fraud since, differently from other productions, organic and conventional farms share the same irrigation system, based on a network of watercourses and channels that cross the valley of the river Po. Therefore, the auditing authorities cannot deem traces of banned chemicals in rice plants to be objective proof of forbidden treatments, since it is impossible to exclude accidental contamination through the sharing of irrigation water. Furthermore, the lack of chemical residues on the rice grain, despite repeated spraying of the plant, which is a good point for consumers, prevents the distinction between the production obtained with the organic method and that obtained with the conventional method, making organic cultivation susceptible to fraud.

Around this goal, the group began to collaborate by sharing previous knowledge and experiences. The partnership gathered latent discontent toward conventional rice cultivation and bitter frustration toward false organic farmers, channeling them into a participatory research system that would allow experimentation and innovation in agroecological rice cultivation.

Network’s role, activities, and structure

Participation in the group allows its members to share know-how and improve individual techniques, quickly adopting and adapting innovations successfully tested by others and, above all, starting a new research process “from below”. The exchange of individual experiences is very important for the site specificity of organic practices. Due to extreme variability in microclimate and soil conditions, as well as in farmers’ resources, capacities and organization, a good technique for one farm may not be feasible or suitable for another. Testing different techniques at the same time within a single context, as seen in parcel experimentation both at the farm and research station level, does not provide useful results in organic farming [ 8 , 48 , 88 ]. Vice versa, the application of the same technique to many different farms allows the growers to produce new insights and learn from one another. The first approach assumes a certain level of uniformity of cropping conditions across different farms. It transfers the results obtained from experimental trials, implying convergence of innovation through a standardized pattern of techniques, valid for different places and different times (the “funnel” scheme). Unfortunately, organic fields are unpredictably diverse, due to the reduction of external inputs that minimize possible sources of variability. Farmer-led trials reveal the constraints and benefits of different techniques by applying them to a wide range of field conditions and farm contexts and then selecting and adapting those that best respond to the specific characteristics of each farm (“folding fan” scheme). Bell and Bellon [ 6 ] explain the difference between the two approaches in terms of universalization versus generalization. The active involvement of the farmers in the research process makes it possible to experiment and adapt the same techniques to different farms, to achieve the quick and efficient generalization of best practices. Because of the extreme variability of environmental conditions among organic farms, even those where the same species are grown, the rapid dissemination of innovative results would not be feasible if the farmers were not involved—that is, if it were not supported by those who spend most of their time in the fields, carefully observing nature and its interactions with their own work, supervising the experiments and verifying their results year after year.

“Results come from individual experience, but experience comes from the exchanges among the farmers, who experiment with different techniques, each on their own land, each with their entrepreneurial approach. The mixing, discussion and reflection with the researchers and officials brings about improvements in the sector. Everyone has given and received much—this is the true strength of a network. We have become a network because we have done a lot of sharing, guided by mutual trust.” (Female farmer)

The activity of the network has allowed its members to improve existing agronomic techniques, increase and stabilize yields, and make actual discoveries, such as those regarding the allelopathic function of some species used as cover crop.

The research process is complemented by mutual assistance in the choice of machinery and suppliers, as well as in the management of the business, marketing strategies, information on regulations, and funding opportunities.

At first, discussion and collaboration among the members of the network concentrated on agronomic practices, the performance and constraints of little known agro-techniques, and issues of business administration and marketing. Then, the focus widened to include questions not strictly related to farming, e.g., measures to improve the transparency and integrity of the supply chain (critical issues and opportunities regarding both the improvement of the traditional organic certification system and alternative participative certification systems), practices to enhance plant biodiversity in the paddy fields, etc.

The governance of the network is very simple. A rice grower acts as leader of the farmer members, while a research fellow from the University of Milan serves as a bridge to the academic component and animates the entire network by taking care of overall communication. The group meets periodically, about once a month, preferably at the home of the farmers’ leader. The meetings last a whole day and include a shared lunch, for which everyone brings something that they have cooked. Regular attendance is supported by sharing meals and by common participation in other activities (e.g., training visits, trade fairs). The fact that all the participants invest a great deal of time in the network meetings and activities is not seen as a limit, but as a strength of the network.

The agenda of the meetings is set and shared by email. The researchers and farmers’ leader facilitate the discussion, which flows quite spontaneously, and use a projector to present data, results and videos, but no particular participatory method or approach is deliberately used. Sometimes, visits to one or more farms follow the discussion and help to verify the progress of the experiments undertaken directly in the field.

Outreach initiatives are carried out together with the research activity, including scientific publications authored by all the members of the network, seminars and conferences (i.e., ORP3 in Brazil in 2018 and a national conference open to all the actors of the supply chain, including the media, in Milan in 2019). The network is also preparing a manual for the identification of weeds in the paddy fields, a summary document on yields in organic rice cultivation and self-checking guidelines for the certification system.

Research process

The research process is managed through four cyclically repeating phases:

A phase of discussion concerning the issues detected in daily practice and possible experiments to investigate them.

A phase of experimentation conducted by the rice growers on their own farms but monitored by the farmers’ leader and the research fellow, who periodically visit the farmers and assist them with their technical needs, both directly in the fields and from a distance via social networks and email. At times, neighboring farmers also take part in the visits, to see the fields and give suggestions.

A collective phase of gathering, sharing, analyzing, and interpreting the results.

A phase of adoption of innovations at the farm level and identification of further critical issues.

Without knowing it, the growers are using the cycle learning process proposed by Kolb in his theory on experiential learning [ 49 ], in which concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation follow one another. Such an approach does not involve specific planning or the use of facilitating tools; rather, it centers around a reflexive, flexible, and iterative process. The action–reflection cycle helps establish a body of knowledge that is constructed and refined by the participants and represents a synthesis of the different skills brought to the partnership. A good example of this process is the research activity on plant biodiversity. During a conference, a farmer came into contact with some academics from the University of Pavia who were talking about a typical indigenous species found in the paddy fields ( Marsilea quadrifolia L.), which had been declared endangered due to massive herbicide use [ 11 ]. The farmer recognized the plant from having seen it in her fields and invited the incredulous scientists to visit her farm. The discovery triggered a research project, carried out on the land of all the farmers in the network and in the university lab, to verify the relationship between agronomic practices and plant biodiversity and enhance the ecological function of the paddy fields. It also offered the opportunity to design the brand “Marsilea rice”, to be used on the market to strengthen the identity of the group in opposition to false organic farmers. This example clearly shows how flexible the network is in its activities and scope, effectively combining a wide range of disciplines.

The members of the network are all at the same level and participate in the research and innovation process without a hierarchical approach. The academics provide their knowledge and stimulate the adoption of scientific procedures, but they are open to new forms of learning from cross-cultural exchange. They emphasize that their involvement in the network is driven by genuine interest in participatory research, curiosity about its functioning and fun and excitement in experimenting alternative forms of doing research. They admit that this research approach is not successful in terms of publications.

“Now I want to test this new approach, understand if it works, where it doesn’t work, why it works, with the clear and critical thinking of a researcher, without taking for granted that it will be a successful process. For instance, in terms of publications, it isn’t, but it is undoubtedly more interesting, fun, and exciting.” (Professor, male)

The scientists have backgrounds in agronomy, natural sciences, agricultural economy, and rural sociology, but they lack specific skills in participatory methodology. They share a commitment to participatory research that prioritizes respect, trust, and openness to experience, and their attitude is fundamental to ensure good relationships with the farmers and the other actors in the network. The researchers take the farmers’ skills very seriously to prioritize research aims and develop and validate agronomic practices. This trust is perceived by the farmers and reciprocated. Indeed, regular and direct contact between the researchers and the farmers allows them to strengthen the feeling of mutual trust that they have built.

The fact that a company distributing organic products has been present since the establishment of the network has meant that many of the farmers involved have signed a supply contract with this company. The agreement requires compliance with a set of strict cultivation guidelines deemed to be even more stringent than that required by the European organic certification regulations.

A female farmer explains: “It is an unbelievably strict contract. When you sign it, you accept being under constant monitoring, with two checks, one during the growth phase, when a rice sample is taken and analyzed, and another before the harvest—two multi-residual analyses—and then constant technical inspections. There is also a sort of protocol involving green manure or harrowing, so using cover crops or rotary tillers, but no support whatsoever.”

According to the producers, this seriousness is a guarantee for their image and is well remunerated by their buyers. So far, this economic relationship among many members of the network has not been considered an obstacle to the group’s research and innovation goals.

The network’s research activities have been funded through public and private tenders (e.g., bank foundations), and some members have supported them with their own funds. Although this is an example of bottom–up research funding, the extemporaneous and unorganized nature of such support prevents any assessment of this aspect.

Furthermore, the members have not yet taken into consideration issues of research ethics, such as confidentiality, property of innovations, and conflicts of interest.

Shared values

When the members of the network describe the values that they share, they mention a wide variety of topics, such as environmental commitment, responsible business ethics, economic rationality, aesthetics, and enhanced satisfaction in doing their job. Some common principles recur in the narratives collected through the interviews:

The members of the group are engaged in organic rice cultivation because they pursue not only economic profit, but also the protection of the environment in which they work and live, for themselves and for others.

“The radical decision of going organic, which I made a few years ago, was motivated, above all, by the situation of the market, which no longer offered any guarantee of profit or sustainability from any point of view. In my opinion, organic farming went instead in the direction of sustainability and business growth oriented toward the future. It means meeting the needs of aware consumers, producing a series of positive externalities besides the mere production of foodstuff. To me, being an organic rice producer today means being a business that yields a better type of food in many regards, provides a healthy environment, and is attentive to resources, which are not my private resources but common goods for the whole community, such as water and soil. Making this choice provides positive answers to all of these issues. This is what doing organic farming means.” (Young male farmer)

They believe that farmers must take responsibility for the environmental impact of agriculture.

They honor this commitment with courage.

They include ethics among the most important values of their activity.

“Climate change has forced us to face our responsibilities. Science is not neutral; it is not aseptic. Passion, ethics, values, ideals, and vision must be part of research. In organic farming, this is a viable path. It is not just a utopia; it is technically feasible too.” (Professor, male)

They believe that in organic farming, they can express their creativity, professionalism, and values, which were frustrated in conventional agriculture.

“Doing organic farming means doing varied and creative work. This is what organic farming requires. The seasons change every year and there is no fixed date for sowing, no fixed protocol, it changes from land to land. So, you need a lot of focus and a creative mind. Agriculture of this sort relies on everyone’s collaboration, intelligence and creativity. And everyone is important.” (Female farmer)

“The biggest difference between conventional farmers and organic farmers is that organic farmers feel peace of mind, they know that they’re doing the right thing. This is the underlying reason, they know that they are working at their best, that their cultivation methods are superior in quality, without compromises, and that there is no one to tell them what they should do, to give them chemicals. They know that they are working healthy fields, not sick fields constantly in need of chemicals for this and that.” (Female farmer)

Basing their work largely on their own abilities and resources, they feel more responsible, autonomous and free of constraints than when they used conventional methods and were highly dependent on external inputs.

“I decided to work the land with my own hands because I have always liked nature. As a child, I went to the countryside and I spent entire days observing the colors, the light, the shapes of nature. Being able to do a job that would bring me back to a place that was natural to me was the right choice. Obviously, it is not all bucolic and effortless. You are faced with all the problems of a much more difficult type of agriculture that puts you in direct correlation with nature, makes you use your brain. No technician comes along to tell you what to do. There are no technicians in organic rice farming. It’s all up to us. So, this also makes you more perceptive.” (Female farmer)

They believe that organic farming is a means of reducing costs and earning the right income for a decent life. When they practiced conventional cropping, most of their revenues were used to pay consultants and suppliers, and the margins to live with dignity were limited.

“I hope I’ll have a proud future, not a meagre one, not only in economic terms, but also from the point of view of the dignity of my work, which has something to give to everyone. I want to keep doing this with my head held high and I want those who will come after me to be able to do the same, with the same pride, the same determination, the same will to do it well.” (Young male farmer)

They find satisfaction working in contact with the land and aesthetic pleasure in the observation of nature: They believe that organic farming is the only way to preserve the beauty of nature and live in harmony with it.

“This is the land I got from my ancestors, my father and grandfather. I am proud to own it and I have always felt the responsibility of owning this land. The choice of going organic developed over many years, out of the awareness that we belong to nature and, as nature’s children, we are called upon to practice farming that respects nature, that loves it.” (Female farmer)

Their mission is to prove that organic rice cultivation can be carried out seriously and transparently.

They express their opinions and values with a very high level of emotional engagement. “Years ago, if I had had to imagine what my future business and my profession would be like, I would have never imagined, never even dreamed, that I could reach such a high level of satisfaction, creation of common work, collaboration with other farmers, with universities, with the Ministry. Not in my wildest dreams. I am so very happy.” (Female farmer)

In the network, they have created a physical, epistemic, and emotional space in which they meet and engage in shared knowledge production, free of power relations.

A young male farmer says: “During our meetings, it happens that at the start I have an opinion and, by the end, I have changed my mind completely. For someone like me, that is pretty strange. It’s not easy for me to admit that my ideas were not so good after all. This is what happens in our group. The discussions and sharing all together, each with their own opinions, allow us to come up with new, better ideas. This is possible since all points of view are equally important and no one is judged because of what they say.”

A female farmer adds: “We didn’t keep anything to ourselves, if one of us found out how to do something, they would tell the others: look, this is how you can do it. (…) I don’t necessarily say the right things. Someone else might see things differently and have the right intuition for that situation. Then, when all’s said and done, I will also agree that what that person said was right…”

Speaking about the professor who is a member of the network, another female farmer says: “He was very smart, he said: I have nothing to teach you from a technical point of view. It is you who should teach me. You know all the methods. We got on well with him, because he’s an intelligent person, he gets things right away. That’s how this participated research came about. He had twelve serious businesses to collaborate with.”

In such a space, practices and emotions are both valued and legitimated. Many of the members of the group state that they have become friends and that this has allowed them to overcome the sense of loneliness widespread among organic rice farmers, which continues to be one of the main motivations for participating in the activities of the group.

A female farmer says: “We’ve also become friends, because we have met very often, we have shared many things. We spend whole days together, so we socialize, we share our problems, the nice moments, our emotions too, like the storks on the electricity poles, the frogs hopping all around, some strange bird we saw for the first time, the selfies… (…) In my opinion, this is another step in participatory research. It counts too. It has been a big help because we don’t feel lonely… Otherwise, you know, they tell you you’re odd, you’re a fool, why should you bother when you can just spray something, since no one checks anyway… so you start feeling isolated, very much so. I think it is greatly appreciated and it is the right way forward.”

Emotions emerge as an important factor in the innovative learning process of the network, as described in Lund and Chemi [ 53 ] and Bellocchi et al. [ 7 ].

The fact that agronomic science and agricultural practice are very close has fostered their mutual understanding. They speak a common language, but what has truly brought them together is the sharing of a common mission, vision, and responsibility.

The peculiarity of the RBV network is that it is made up of people that have different degrees of authority and knowledge, and yet come together. Power differences (which inevitably exist between farmers, government officials, academics, etc.) are overcome and, although the more charismatic people act as leaders, the network is not hierarchical, since each member has put a collective goal (i.e., the research objectives) before their professional aims (i.e., profit, publications, etc.). This entails more relaxed interactions, as the spirit of collaboration seems to reduce the dynamics of power normally expressed in a competitive environment.

A young female researcher says: “I used to work in another university and I was very frustrated. The way of doing research was oriented toward competition and I didn’t like that, but I saw no alternative. That was how the system worked and I was a newcomer, I counted for nothing. Then, one day, I was at a congress, sitting next to the professor who was my thesis advisor. A colleague from our group was presenting some results, which came largely from my field work. I had worked so hard for my PhD. And this colleague was showing an article, bearing the names of all the people in the workgroup, except mine. I looked again, I thought I had to be wrong. I turned toward my professor and he said: ‘See how nasty we can be?’. I wanted to cry. But that moment made me understand that I had to change. I came here and I started working on this project, together with the farmers. I might never have a university career, but this work gives me satisfaction. I spend time in the fields with the farmers and I learn a great deal from them. We have published in international journals and we have put the names of all the farmers involved, specifically to acknowledge their contribution.”

Future of the network

The network defines itself as open and inclusive, but it has not established rules for the admission of new members, and applications to join made by other producers are assessed very carefully by the member farmers. The key requirement is to adhere to the principles of seriousness that characterize the network and, until now, this has been assessed through direct knowledge of the rice growers and their fields. During the process of inclusion of new farmers, the importance of relationships based on trust means that applicants are accepted only if they are considered “true organic”, beyond any official certification.

The network also features some public officials belonging to the institutions tasked with shaping policies for the transformation of rural areas, but so far, no initiative has been launched to stimulate a formal dialogue with these institutions.

The farmers are very directly involved in the network, appreciate the research activity and equal relationship with the researchers, and intend to formalize it in the near future. For their part, the researchers find this kind of work promising and engaging. The environmental outcomes of supporting a group of pioneering farmers involved in the difficult conversion to organic production justify the commitment of public personnel (researchers and officials), at least for now. In the future, the role of both researchers and officials will need to be redefined to avoid criticism for supporting a private group. The scaling-up of the research focus from mainly agronomic interests to the pursuit of sustainable development goals may also eventually motivate public participation. A workshop to understand if and how to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals of Agenda 2030 [ 93 ] into the network has been conducted, but it has not led to any concrete assumption of responsibility.

Conclusions

The RBV network is a group of diverse actors from the organic rice sector participating in collective, self-planned, and self-developed research. Farmers, scientists, extension agents, government officials, and business managers are co-learning and co-producing knowledge and innovation. This public–private partnership is a voluntary, multi-year relationship that addresses the needs of the organic rice farmers, as well as those of the territory and the community, i.e., environmental issues and integrity of the supply chain.

An effective process of scientific and local knowledge sharing is taking place within the network. Cooperation is based on mutual trust and a common concern, i.e., how to shift from high-input cropping to organic farming, with the ultimate goal of protecting the environment and human well-being. The members’ active participation is mainly due to the fact that the activities carried out originate from real needs and concrete research questions.

The network follows a loosely structured agenda that allows for the continuous inclusion of new matters related to organic rice farming. In contrast to traditional research projects, which are planned in advance and leave little room for changes in goals, activities and methods, the spontaneous nature of this group generates high variability in the issues addressed, constantly reorienting its approach toward the emerging research questions.

This is a self-building group, formed around existing social relations, but inclusive and flexible: the joining of new actors (i.e., additional farmers, researchers skilled in specific topics, supply chain operators, etc.) is actively pursued through dissemination activities.

The participants show a very high degree of commitment and responsibility. The most evident sign of this is the considerable amount of time dedicated to research, both on the farms and in the regular meetings. All the members of the network are equally involved in the process of (i) defining the research questions and the activities to answer such questions, (ii) managing the research activities and the network’s organization, (iii) finding the resources needed for the research, inside and outside the network, and (iv) interpreting and evaluating the results. Such engagement is what makes them responsible, which is further confirmed by their strong motivation to disseminate the research results among other stakeholders outside the network.

Their involvement in the research process is transformative for the participants, who clearly admit that, by joining the network, they have changed their practices but also their ideas and beliefs. Such learning can create further transformations both in the sector and in the territory. Thanks to their intense communication work, the project findings are shared with other farmers and stakeholders and the network’s perspectives are brought to the attention of the institutions tasked with decisions on the transformation of rural areas. It will be interesting to follow the evolution of this network, so as to understand if it will essentially remain a group of friends engaged in collaborative research activities or if it will be able to develop into a model of innovation for the sector and an interlocutor for public decision-makers. In order to become an actor in the scientific and political debate, the network will probably need a more organized structure and include other relevant stakeholders, such as consumers, rural dwellers, and environmental NGOs.

Home and Rump [ 40 ] analyze 17 European Learning and Innovation Networks in Sustainable Agriculture (LINSAs) as part of the EU transdisciplinary research project SOLINSA. LINSAs are defined as networks of producers, consumers, experts, NGOs, SMEs, local administrations, researchers, and/or extensionists who are mutually engaged in pursuing common goals for sustainable agriculture and rural development, cooperating, sharing resources, and co-producing new knowledge by creating the right conditions for communication. Our case fits this definition perfectly. Home and Rump ( Ibidem ) recognize a wide variety of network typologies: from local scale to national or transnational; from small, simple homogenous networks to large, complex and diverse networks with multiple actors and “networks of networks”; from incremental to radical innovation; from top–down to bottom-up origin; and with several action fields, including non-food oriented, food production oriented and consumer oriented. Their study shows that LINSAs may emerge from small groups of farmers or may be inspired by individuals; they may develop as the formalization of an existing diffuse network or grow through a progressive process of co-opting local groups. Their size can vary from small (about 30 members), as in our case study, to about 100,000 farmers and 2,500 facilitators. Compared with the case studies presented by the two authors, our network has the following key characteristics:

Trans-regional scale (several regions of northern Italy);

Small dimension and simple structure;

Heterogeneous participation in terms of gender and age, but more homogeneous participation in terms of experiences and values (e.g., all the members are oriented toward the production of organic rice) and categories involved (consumers and NGOs are not present);

Commitment to both radical innovations (transition from conventional to organic rice) and incremental innovations;

Spontaneous, bottom–up origin;

Various action fields, including food production oriented, non-food oriented (environmental impact) and consumer oriented;

Low degree of formality;

Loose network with closed boundaries (participation in the network is voluntary, but the inclusion of new members appears to be contingent on sharing the same values, i.e., conventional farmers not willing to change are not accepted).

Participatory network experiences, especially for organic production, can be improved by considering the results of our analysis. In particular, in line with evidence from other studies [ 34 ], the importance of a supporting environment that facilitates and coordinates the learning processes is confirmed. What our case study highlights is that this environment can also be hardly structured or formalized. Indeed, it appears that the informal nature of the network is one of the key factors in its success.

As in Mukute and Lotz-Sisitka [ 64 ], collective learning happens when a group of people with different experiences and perspectives work together on the same issues and seek to jointly develop new knowledge or tools to address problems. As in Benton and Craib [ 9 ], in the learning process there is an emancipatory intent that is committed to changing unsatisfactory and oppressive realities, such as the socioeconomic and ethical crisis in the rice sector that started in 2014.

As Von Münchhausen and Häring [ 95 ] conclude, farmer–university networks function effectively if all their participants are considered equal partners. The findings of our research confirm the results of Home and Rump [ 40 ] who analyzed 17 networks, concluding with the identification of common factors that contribute to successful collaboration. Among these is the need to identify and build a working relationship with key partners, based on mutual trust and commitment, to strike a balance between guidance and listening, interactions and freedom, and to pursue positive and critical reflection—a fragile equilibrium that is difficult and time consuming to establish.

As in Mendez et al. [ 58 ], mutual learning takes place thanks to reciprocated trust, commitment and responsibility by all actors. These processes are favored by shared values. As a professor in our network points out, “Science is not neutral; it is not aseptic. Passion, ethics, values, ideals, and vision must be part of research.”

Mutual understanding is fostered by the use of a common language, both technical and methodological. Although applied for the first time in the network, the participatory approach has been fully espoused by its members. Despite being no experts in participation techniques, the network members understand and approve the reasons for participation.

The farmers involved in the network are well educated, unlike most farmers, and this aspect may influence their ability to speak a common language, comprehended by both the researchers and the other farmers.

The conversion to organic is often seen as a matter of procedures codified by regulations for a given period of time. For farmers, however, as the case study shows, conversion does not restrict itself to these procedures, but entails transformations that transcend any legal period and definition and have to do with the learning process that occurs in the network.

Our study results contribute to the participatory research approach by showing that personal values and attitudes are crucial. These certainly originate in the professional and human paths of the people involved, but can be developed both in education and training courses and through coaching and tutoring initiatives by other farmers and researchers who have had similar positive experiences.

Agroecology is an alternative development model to the failure of the traditional top–down innovation approach. It is said to be a knowledge intensive—as opposed to input intensive—agricultural practice [ 3 , 24 ]. Agroecology is also defined as the integration of scientific disciplines, agricultural practices, and social movements [ 97 ]. Hence, it requires an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge and pluralism in the ways of knowing. Participatory research, that is a transdisciplinary process, can therefore be seen as the right approach for the transition to agroecology. However, participatory processes need skillful researchers and farmers who have the ability to implement them and are willing to engage in the collaboration themselves. If we look at the matter from a sectoral perspective, the development of human capital receives little attention in the CAP. As highlighted by several recent studies, reforms are needed in this respect. A key suggestion that can be drawn from our case study is that of investing in the development of human capital and in the education of farmers and researchers in an integrated and coordinated way, so that they can develop skills in both agroecology practice and participatory research, designing new curricula in technical schools and universities and promoting the exchange of experiences between networks. A strong push toward education in farming is needed. Initial training is of national competence and agricultural education systems vary widely throughout the EU. But better integration between school and academic education and lifelong training is planned for the future through the European Social Fund and the CAP’s second pillar on Rural Development [ 5 ]. The future of European Participatory Research Networks can benefit from this integration. At the same time, bringing together complementary types of knowledge in a transdisciplinary approach, they can support that integration in innovative ways.

Availability of data and materials

The data supporting the findings of this study (audio and video recordings of the interviews; direct observation notes) are not publicly available, as they contain information that may compromise the privacy of those participating in the research, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge with gratitude the active involvement of the Riso Bio Vero network members and their willingness to tell their stories and share their thoughts. The interpretations in this article remain the authors’ own.

This study was carried out as part of the Riso-Biosystems three-year project (2017-2019), funded by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Forestry Policies to study and promote organic rice. The funding body does not have any role in the design of the study, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data and in the writing of the manuscript.

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Pagliarino, E., Orlando, F., Vaglia, V. et al. Participatory research for sustainable agriculture: the case of the Italian agroecological rice network. Eur J Futures Res 8 , 7 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-020-00166-9

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• Rice farming
• Agroecology
• Participatory research

The agricultural transition: Building a sustainable future

In 2020, we released our report Agriculture and climate change , which identified key actions the agricultural industry could take to support decarbonization. 1 “ Reducing agriculture emissions through improved farming practices ,” McKinsey, May 6, 2020. For this report, our research has focused on how decarbonization measures have evolved, as well as on the key barriers to their adoption and the actions industry players and investors can take to support their uptake. At the same time, conversations about sustainable transitions have increasingly focused on agriculture’s effects on nature and society beyond climate change. For example, agricultural land covers half of all habitable land and is responsible for 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals. 2 Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Land use,” Our World in Data, September 2019; “Water in agriculture,” World Bank, October 5, 2022. In addition, food systems are the primary driver of biodiversity loss around the world, and these systems have growing effects on biosphere integrity, human health, and food access. 3 “Our global food system is the primary driver of biodiversity loss,” United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), February 3, 2021. While climate change remains the focus of this report, decarbonization and the actions to achieve it cannot be considered separately from their broader impacts on nature and society. Trade-offs and other benefits associated with decarbonization actions are highlighted throughout the report.

About the authors

Achieving a 1.5° pathway will require actions that extend beyond the farm throughout the value chain. Chief among these actions are reducing food loss and waste, adopting dietary shifts, and adapting how we use arable land, all of which are critical to decarbonization and will help the industry meet global food needs while maintaining the livelihoods of farmers (Exhibit 1).

• Tackling food waste. Approximately 30 percent of the world’s food is lost or wasted every year. 4 “Food loss” refers to food that is lost at or near the time of harvest, while “food waste” refers to food that is fit for consumption but discarded at the consumption or retail phase. For more, see UNEP food waste index report 2021 , UNEP, March 4, 2021. Food loss and waste not only contribute an estimated 8 to 10 percent of global anthropogenic emissions 5 Climate change and land , Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2019. but also drive food insecurity and overproduction, the latter of which contributes in turn to nature degradation. It is estimated that food waste could be reduced by approximately 23 percent by 2050, which would account for approximately 0.7 metric gigatons (Gt) of CO 2 equivalent (CO 2 e). 6 “IPR Forecast Policy Scenario + Nature,” PRI Association, January 9, 2023. To achieve these reductions, we will need to better connect supply chains, improve preservation, adapt purchasing habits, and make more productive use of food loss or waste, creating opportunities for industrials across the value chain.
• Shifting what we eat. Dietary shifts are already opening new markets and creating value for farmers and industrials. Producers and consumers can avoid releasing a substantial amount of emissions by turning to alternative protein sources, including plant-based products and precision-fermented and cellular products that are nearly identical to animal protein products. For example, classic plant-based options emit 12 percent of the total greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted by cattle and have a lesser ratio of methane per kilogram of product. 7 “Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model (GLEAM),” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), accessed January 4, 2023. Dietary shifts away from animal proteins could save nearly 640 million hectares of land, which could in turn be reforested or be a locus for other nature-based solutions. 8 Global innovation needs assessments: Protein diversity , ClimateWorks Foundation, November 1, 2021. Of course, in the case of alternative protein sources, trade-offs, including human health, food access, and farmer equity, are especially important and must be adequately considered as part of any transition.
• Addressing land use with nature-based solutions. Agricultural land covers approximately 4.9 billion hectares, or 38 percent of the world’s terrestrial area, and is estimated to account for approximately 80 percent of global land-use change as land is cleared or converted for cropland, feed production, or grazing land. 9 “Land use in agriculture by the numbers,” FAO, May 7, 2020; Tim G. Benton et al., Food system impacts on biodiversity loss: Three levers for food system transformation in support of nature , Chatham House, February 2021. Given this enormous land-use footprint, nature-based solutions, including conservation and restoration solutions, have the potential to abate 6.7 GtCO 2 e in 2050—approximately 80 percent of the total abatement potential. 10 Based on McKinsey analysis and Inevitable Policy Response (IPR) Nature Scenario; “IPR 2021 Forecast Policy Scenario and 1.5C Required Policy Scenario,” Vivid Economics, accessed January 4, 2023. The largest levers for achieving this potential concern improved forestry practices, especially forest restoration. Notably, adoption of many nature-based solutions will likely require increased land-use intensification to meet global food demand and adequate incentives for farmers to limit future land conversion.

Changing how we farm, the focus of this report, is critical to a successful transition. Building on our previous work, we have defined 28 measures that can support decarbonization on the farm while creating potential value for the industry and farmers (Exhibit 2). Together, these measures have an annual emissions-reduction of approximately 2.2 GtCO 2 . Many of these measures can be implemented at little to no cost to the farmer and have benefits beyond emissions reductions, including yield and biodiversity uplift.

Although a 1.5˚ pathway exists and can create value for farmers and the broader industry, meaningful barriers are preventing adoption of decarbonization solutions at scale. Farmers are central to the sustainability transition, but they do not yet have sufficient incentives to adopt new methods and technologies. Emissions tracing and other actions require new, innovative solutions to facilitate decarbonization. And there is much room to grow in helping farmers overcome challenges in scaling their operations and maintaining profitability.

The findings in this report can guide food and agriculture organizations as they transition to increased sustainability. Each intervention should be tailored to its specific context, but broadly speaking, change requires the following:

• financial incentives to spur farmer action, whether through carbon markets, green premiums, subsidies, rebates, or other green-financing mechanisms
• ecosystem collaboration and improved tracking and traceability to bring solutions to market and support monetization of on-farm practice changes and purchaser decision making
• research and investment to bend the cost curve to reduce adoption costs of existing solutions and support the development and scale-up of new technologies

The food and agriculture value chain has a chance to create a more sustainable ecosystem that feeds a growing planet while maintaining the livelihoods of farmers. With tailored and concentrated action, industry players, policy makers, and investors can accelerate the path to this future while enabling their own growth.

Although the path to achieving 1.5˚C will not be straightforward, it can create real business value for farmers and players throughout the value chain, with additional environmental benefits beyond reducing climate change. Action will be required beyond the farm, but there is a real opportunity to drive on-farm decarbonization while capturing business value. A more sustainable future for agriculture that feeds a growing planet while maintaining the livelihoods of farmers is feasible. And industry players, policy makers, and investors can accelerate the path to the future while enabling their own growth.

Onyx Bengston is a consultant in McKinsey’s Denver office; Sherry Feng is a consultant in the New York office, where Vasanth Ganesan is a partner; Joshua Katz is a partner in the Stamford office; Hannah Kitchel is a consultant in the Boston office; Pradeep Prabhala is a partner in the Washington, DC, office; Peter Mannion is a partner in the Dublin office; Adam Richter is a consultant in the New Jersey office; Wilson Roen is a consultant in the Chicago office; and Jan Vlcek is a consultant in the Vancouver office.

The authors wish to thank the following people for their contributions to this report: Michael Aldridge, Peter Amer, Robert Beach, Stephen Butler, Jude (Judith) Capper, N. Andy Cole, Amelia de Almeida, Albert De Vries, Stefan Frank, Pierre J. Gerber, Mathijs J. H. M. Harmsen, Roger S. Hegarty, Mario Herrero, Ermias Kebreab, Michael MacLeod, Jennie Pryce, Caeli Richardson, Kendall Samuelson, Pete Smith, Philip Thornton, Mark van Nieuwland, Roel Veerkamp, and Xiaoyu (Iris) Feng.

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Efficiency and driving factors of agricultural carbon emissions: a study in chinese state farms.

1. Introduction

• What is the current status of agricultural carbon emissions and carbon emission efficiency in Chinese state farms?
• How have the agricultural carbon emissions and the carbon emission efficiency evolved spatiotemporally?
• What are the key factors influencing carbon emissions in Chinese state farms, and how can these factors be decomposed to inform the development of low-carbon strategies?

2. Methodology

2.1. study area, 2.2. data and sample, 2.3. ipcc method, 2.4. super-sbm model and malmquist–luenberger index, 2.5. lmdi method, 3.1. temporal evolution of agricultural carbon emissions, 3.2. spatial evolution of agricultural carbon emissions, 3.3. the distribution of agricultural carbon emission efficiency, 3.4. influencing factors of agricultural carbon emission, 4. discussion, 5. conclusions, 6. limitations and future directions, author contributions, institutional review board statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Han, G.; Xu, J.; Zhang, X.; Pan, X. Efficiency and Driving Factors of Agricultural Carbon Emissions: A Study in Chinese State Farms. Agriculture 2024 , 14 , 1454. https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14091454

Han G, Xu J, Zhang X, Pan X. Efficiency and Driving Factors of Agricultural Carbon Emissions: A Study in Chinese State Farms. Agriculture . 2024; 14(9):1454. https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14091454

Han, Guanghe, Jiahui Xu, Xin Zhang, and Xin Pan. 2024. "Efficiency and Driving Factors of Agricultural Carbon Emissions: A Study in Chinese State Farms" Agriculture 14, no. 9: 1454. https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14091454

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Sustainable agriculture and society, acknowledgements.

Feenstra, G., Ingels, C., Campbell, D. What is Sustainable Agriculture? University of California Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. http://asi.ucdavis.edu/sarep/about/def

References and Recommended Reading

Altieri, M. A. Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995.

Gliessman, S. R. Agroecology: Ecological Processes in Sustainable Agriculture. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2000.

Hinrichs, C. C. & Lyson, T. A. Remaking the North American Food System: Strategies for Sustainability. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

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Rural Inclusive Finance and Agricultural Carbon Reduction: Evidence from China

• Published: 22 August 2024

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• Jizhi Li 1 &
• Qi Jiang 2  

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The continuous improvement of global carbon emissions has increased the vulnerability of regional ecosystems. Exploring the relationship between rural inclusive finance and agricultural carbon emission reduction is crucial to achieving the strategic goal of sustainable development. This paper empirically analyzes the effect of rural inclusive finance on agricultural carbon emission reduction using balanced panel data for 30 Chinese provinces from 2010 to 2021. The research findings are as follows: (1) Rural inclusive finance can significantly promote agricultural carbon reduction, mainly through the effects of agricultural technological progress, redistribution of production factors, and pollution mitigation. (2) Rural inclusive finance has a spatial spillover effect, which can accelerate agricultural carbon emission reduction in surrounding areas. (3) The positive effect of rural inclusive finance on agricultural carbon emission reduction is more obvious in eastern regions and major grain-producing areas, with significant regional heterogeneity. This study deepens the understanding of the internal effects and regional linkages of rural inclusive finance empowering agricultural carbon emission reduction.

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The datasets that were used and/or analyzed in the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Li, J., Jiang, Q. Rural Inclusive Finance and Agricultural Carbon Reduction: Evidence from China. J Knowl Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-02261-9

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Received : 22 April 2024

Accepted : 28 July 2024

Published : 22 August 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-02261-9

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