Sustainable agricultural practices

Transforming agricultural landscapes to be more sustainable and resilient requires integrated and multidisciplinary approaches. Linking automated experimental platforms with living labs can accelerate knowledge gain, enhance interdisciplinary collaboration, and support real-world change by addressing key challenges in current agricultural systems.

Multiple cropping has a significant impact on environmental and socioeconomic outcomes of farming, but is not fully considered in model-based assessments of sustainable agriculture

Plastics need to be used more sustainably in agricultural practice, for example by recovery and reuse, and by selected application of safe biodegradable plastics and phasing out of toxic additives, suggests a literature synthesis and perspective on structural polymers in agriculture.

Commonly used auxin herbicides at environmentally relevant concentrations promoted the absorption and translocation of chlorinated polyfluoroalkyl sulfonate in wheat, indicating ecological risk, according to plant exposure experiments.

Higher soil pH promotes rapid ammonia oxidation through enhanced nitrification, thereby reducing substrate availability for ammonia volatilization that finally leads to reduced ammonia emission, according to an analysis of 1792 field measurements across global croplands.

Strategic carbon–nitrogen co-sequestration and fertilizer use were insufficient in northeastern China’s warming-vulnerable black soil, causing a loss of about 3.9 Mg carbon per hectare of soil organic carbon from 1980 to 2010, based on 721 soil samples across northern China.

A portion of Brazilian soy and beef exports to China and the EU rely on river basins with high or critical water scarcity, emphasising the need for multi-indicator assessments to guide decisions towards sustainable production and supply chains, according to an analysis of water use with deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions during 2015–2017.

Transition from open field to intensive greenhouse farming significantly decreased protist phylogenetic diversity by almost 42% resulting in the loss of soil multifunctionality, according to an analysis of soil samples collected from 89 locations in 9 provinces located in mid-eastern China.

Multifunctional land-use systems supply multiple ecosystem services while contributing to biodiversity conservation. This Review summarizes the provision of ecosystem services and their trade-offs and synergies with biodiversity at the landscape scale, explores traditional, contemporary and emerging land-use systems, and highlights strategies and challenges to achieve multifunctionality in conservation and restoration.

Analysis of crop yields, farmer income and bird species abundances identifies multiple positive outcomes of a large-scale Indian government-incentivized agroecology initiative.

Momentum is building for regenerative agriculture, a set of approaches that could help farms to weather the changing climate and make them more profitable.

An 8-year field experiment explores optimal biochar application strategies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and boosting economic gains from rice production.