In modern sustainable agriculture, green manuring is increasingly emphasized for a reasonable land use management. However, the expansion of green manure is affected by a range of factors, such as soil geophysical properties and human intervention.
The livestock sector can be a major contributor to the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Within the sector, beef production produces the largest proportion of the livestock sector’s direct emissions.
Important among global issues is the trilemma of abrupt climate change, food insecurity, and environmental degradation. Despite the increasing use of fossil fuel, about one third of global C emissions come from tropical deforestation and indiscriminate use of agricultural practices. Global food insecurity, affecting one in seven persons, aggravates environmental degradation.
Outsourcing, as a productive service, has been widely adopted in industrial production and international trade but less applied in agricultural management. With the advancement of agricultural labor division and specialization, outsourcing is becoming one of the most sustained trends in concurrent business.
To achieve sustainable rural development, it is necessary to simultaneously protect ecologically important land and efficiently use existing agricultural land. Land use functions (LUFs) are widely used to assess regional sustainable development. Guyuan is located in a typical hilly and gully region of western China, with ecologically fragile land.
In the last decade, there have been a number of global/regional targets and initiatives to halt and reverse land degradation and restore degraded land.
The pressure on land is growing in many regions of the world, due to the increasing demand for arable crops, meat and dairy products, bio-energy and timber, and is exacerbated by land degradation and climate change.
Improving land productivity is essential to meet increasing food and forage demands in hillside and mountain communities. Tens of millions of smallholder terrace farmers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who earn $1-2 per day do not have access to peer-reviewed knowledge of best agronomic practices, though they have considerable traditional ecological knowledge.
Farmland abandonment, including perennial and seasonal abandonment, is an important process of land use change that matters most to food security. Although there is a great deal of studies on farmland abandonment, seasonal abandonment, which is as serious as perennial abandonment, has attracted little academic attention.
Land-based production provides societies with indispensable goods such as food, feed, fibre, and energy. Yet, with economic globalisation and global population growth, the environmental and social trade-offs of their production are ever more complex.
