In modern agriculture, pesticides feature so prominently in growers’ arsenal to reduce crop damage caused by various pests and diseases. But their indiscriminate use can harm human health and the environment and, eventually, impact agricultural productivity negatively. In an era of an...

The Health Check (HC) of the European Common Agricultural Policy in 2003 sped up the process of policy reforms toward decoupled payments in order to urge agricultural production to respond to market signals. However, since decoupled payments could generate “coupled” effects on production, it...

Targeting has become the buzz word in the national agri-environmental policy reform in Finland. It is generally accepted that more environmental benefits could be reaped by implementing environmental protection measures where they have the biggest positive impact. However, considering one of the...

Pig farming is one of the strongest polluters of water resources due to its intensive production techniques and slurry rejection. Several European countries have already introduced environmental regulations aiming at reducing the pollution caused by nitrates from agricultural sources, but not...

This study investigates the optimal agricultural land use allocation and nitrogen application to a representative Japanese farm. The site-specific nature of numerous agri-environmental issues necessitates analysis at a disaggregated level in order to capture the underlying heterogeneity of...

Organic and low-input farming practices are considered keystones for the conservation of biodiversity in semi-natural systems. Accordingly, attention to the assessment of the benefits stemming from these activities is increasing in order to provide a solid base for the adoption of...

Integrated land use models (ILM) are increasingly applied tools for the joint assessment of complex economic-environmental farming system interactions. We present an ILM that consists of the crop rotation model CropRota, the bio-physical process model EPIC, and the farm optimization model...

In order to measure agriculture sustainability, the efficient use of inputs becomes a crucial issue. In this perspective, the analysts concentrate their attention on the total factor productivity index (TFP). In this view, Lynam and Herdt (1989) proposed the TFP as a suitable assessment of the...

The aim of this paper is to set-up the algorithm for determining the degree of workability of the soil, to help the owners of family farms to plan working hours of agricultural machines, i.e. with the machine park management. The plans, which would be made by use of these algorithms and based on...

Herbicides account for approximately 2.2% of total farm expenses and are applied to more than 80% of farmland in the USA. The widespread adoption of herbicides contributed to the increased and relatively cheaper productivity of modern intensively managed agricultural systems in developed...