Responding to future challenges and societal needs, various actions are taken in agriculture to evolve towards more sustainable farming practices. These actionsimply strategic choices and suppose adequate sustainability as-sessments to identify, measure, evaluate and communicate sustainable development. However, literature is scarce on the link between strategic decision making and sustainability assessment. As questions emerge on how,what andwhen tomeasure, the objective of this paper is to construct a framework for guiding sustainability assessment and on-farmstrategic decision making. Qualitative research on own experiences fromthe past and a recentproject revealed four categoriesof actualneeds farmers,advisors andexperts have regarding sustainability assessment: context, flexibility, focus on farm and farmer and communication. These stakeholders' needs are then incorporated into a two-dimensional framework that marries the intrinsic complexity of sustainability as-sessment tools and the time frame of strategic decision making. The framework allows a farmspecificand flex-ible approach leading to harmonized actions towards sustainable farming. As this framework is mainly a procedural instrument to guide the use of sustainability assessment tools within strategic decision making, it fits to incorporate, even guide, future research on sustainability assessment tools themselves and on their adop-tion on farms.

Agriculture on shallow or steep soils in the humid tropics often leads to low resource use efficiency. Contour hedgerow intercropping systems have been proposed to reduce run‐off and control soil erosion. However, competition for water and nutrients between crops and associated hedgerows may reduce the overall performance of contour hedgerow systems. Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is a valuable technique used to assess the distribution and dynamics of soil moisture noninvasively. In this study, we demonstrated its potential to measure soil water depletion in the field in distinct cropping patterns in Ratchaburi province, Thailand. The measurements showed that the soils of our experimental plots were very heterogeneous both along the slope as with depth. This observation highlighted some constraints of the ERT method for soil moisture monitoring in the field, such as the difficulty of defining a relationship between electrical conductivity and soil moisture in very heterogeneous soils. Nevertheless, spatial analysis of the data revealed contrasting water depletion patterns under monocropping and intercropping systems. In this way, ERT provides access to information about the vadose zone moisture dynamics that would be unavailable with classical soil moisture measurements.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract