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Özkan, Ş., & Hill, J. (2015). Implementing innovative farm management practices on dairy farms:a review of feeding systems. Turkish Journal of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, 39, 1–9.
Abstract: The Australian dairy industry relies primarily on pasture for its feed supply. However, the variability in rainfall negatively affects plant growth, leading to uncertainty in dryland feed supply, especially during periods of high milk price. New feeding (complementary) systems combining perennial ryegrass with another crop and/or pasture species may have the potential to mitigate this seasonal risk and improve productivity and profitability by providing off-season feed. To date, the majority of research studying the integration of alternative crops into pasture-based systems has focused on substitution and utilization of alternative feed sources. There has been little emphasis on the impacts of integration of forage crops into pasture-based systems. This review focuses on pasture-based feeding systems in southeastern Australia and how transitioning of systems contributes to improved productivity leading to improved profitability for dairy farmers.
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Calanca, P., & Semenov, M. A. (2013). Local-scale climate scenarios for impact studies and risk assessments: integration of early 21st century ENSEMBLES projections into the ELPIS database. Theor. Appl. Climatol., 113(3-4), 445–455.
Abstract: We present the integration of early 21st century climate projections for Europe based on simulations carried out within the EU-FP6 ENSEMBLES project with the LARS-WG stochastic weather generator. The aim was to upgrade ELPIS, a repository of local-scale climate scenarios for use in impact studies and risk assessments that already included global projections from the CMIP3 ensemble and regional scenarios for Japan. To obtain a more reliable simulation of daily rainfall and extremes, changes in wet and dry series derived from daily ENSEMBLES outputs were taken into account. Kernel average smoothers were used to reduce noise arising from sampling artefacts. Examples of risk analyses based on 25-km climate projections from the ENSEMBLES ensemble of regional climate models illustrate the possibilities offered by the updated version of ELPIS. The results stress the importance of tailored information for local-scale impact assessments at the European level.
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Sandhu, H., Wratten, S. D., Porter, J. R., Costanza, R., Pretty, J., & Reganold, J. P. (2016). Mainstreaming ecosystem services into future farming solutions. The Solutions Journal, 7(2), 40–47.
Abstract: Agriculture has made remarkable advances in fulfilling the food and nutritional requirement of expanding human numbers worldwide. There are several sustainable farming systems that contribute to overall biodiversity conservation and associated ecosystem services. Yet agricultural practices that have come to predominate since the second half of the 20th century have led to the overuse of fossil fuel-based inputs, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, and loss of biodiversity. These outcomes also have high costs to human health and the environment. Continuing with largely energy-intense, wasteful, polluting, and unsustainable agriculture is no longer a viable option for future world food security and human well-being. There is an urgent need for forms of agricultural production that improve natural capital and ecosystem services (ES) in food systems worldwide. Mainstreaming ES into future agriculture requires protocols to replace some of the nonrenewable resources (e.g. fossil fuel-based pesticides and fertilizers) with renewable resources (ES such as biological control of insect pests or nitrogen fixation by legumes). The protocols presented here have been tested in different agricultural systems that enable farmland to simultaneously provide food and a range of ecosystem services. Recent research demonstrates that managed systems with these protocols exhibit higher economic value of ecosystem services. Thus, there is need to support the deployment of these protocols through various policy mechanisms for the long-term sustainability of agriculture.
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Bennett, E., Carpenter, S. R., Gordon, L. J., Ramankutty, N., Balvanera, P., Campbell, B., et al. (2014). Toward a more resilient agriculture. The Solutions Journal, 5(5), 65–75.
Abstract: Agriculture is a key driver of change in the Anthropocene. It is both a critical factor for human well-being and development and a major driver of environmental decline. As the human population expands to more than 9 billion by 2050, we will be compelled to find ways to adequately feed this population while simultaneously decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture, even as global change is creating new circumstances to which agriculture must respond. Many proposals to accomplish this dual goal of increasing agricultural production while reducing its environmental impact are based on increasing the efficiency of agricultural production relative to resource use and relative to unintended outcomes such as water pollution, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. While increasing production efficiency is almost certainly necessary, it is unlikely to be sufficient and may in some instances reduce long-term agricultural resilience, for example, by degrading soil and increasing the fragility of agriculture to pest and disease outbreaks and climate shocks. To encourage an agriculture that is both resilient and sustainable, radically new approaches to agricultural development are needed. These approaches must build on a diversity of solutions operating at nested scales, and they must maintain and enhance the adaptive and transformative capacity needed to respond to disturbances and avoid critical thresholds. Finding such approaches will require that we encourage experimentation, innovation, and learning, even if they sometimes reduce short-term production efficiency in some parts of the world.
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Dietrich, J. P., Schmitz, C., Lotze-Campen, H., Popp, A., & Muller, C. (2014). Forecasting technological change in agriculture-An endogenous implementation in a global, and use model. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 81, 236–249.
Abstract: Technological change in agriculture plays a decisive role for meeting future demands for agricultural goods. However, up to now, agricultural sector models and models on land use change have used technological change as an exogenous input due to various information and data deficiencies. This paper provides a first attempt towards an endogenous implementation based on a measure of agricultural land use intensity. We relate this measure to empirical data on investments in technological change. Our estimated yield elasticity with respect to research investments is 029 and production costs per area increase linearly with an increasing yield level. Implemented in the global land use model MAgPIE (”Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment”) this approach provides estimates of future yield growth. Highest future yield increases are required in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Our validation with FAO data for the period 1995-2005 indicates that the model behavior is in line with observations. By comparing two scenarios on forest conservation we show that protecting sensitive forest areas in the future is possible but requires substantial investments into technological change. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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