Farming systems designing landscapes: land management units at the interface between agronomy and geography

Abstract

e-mail de contact: ridavide@gmail.comAgriculture faces big challenges, such as feeding a growing population and providing an increasing amount of biomass for energy production. Land is, however, a limited resource and intensification of agricultural practices is deprecated because of the negative impacts on natural resources. Effective answers should therefore be fostered by the development of smarter spatial configurations of agricultural activities. The improvement of farming systems therefore requires agronomy to interact with geography and other disciplines that deal with spatially-explicit aspects of agricultural land management. Different research approaches have supported agronomy in the development of a landscape approach and in this paper we focus on the interactions with geography fostering the enhancement of a common language about the way farming practices are observed and understood by the two disciplines. For this purpose, we compare land management units, identified in recent agronomic literature, with the aim to facilitate future synergies of landscape-oriented research about farming system design. We conclude by arguing for the enhancement of the interface between agronomy and geography and discussing some perspectives on the use of the various land management units in the design of future farming systems with a landscape approach

Miscanthus spatial location as seen by farmers: A machine learning approach to model real criteria

“…We labelled "miscanthus absence" all of the parcels that had none or less than 85% of miscanthus surface. The underpinning hypothesis was to model the farmer's spatial management regarding miscanthus in the context of the overall farm level management to consider his/her main land management units [29]. Finally, the whole dataset was composed of 1939 farmer's blocks.…”

“…This assumption seems, however, to be questioned by a relatively low adoption -approximately 100,000 ha in Europe [7] -compared to their very high technical potential [e.g., 26]. It is therefore important to pursue an up-to-date understanding of farmers' attitudes, behaviours and preferences towards the adoption of perennial energy crops [19,27,28], particularly in the context of farming system innovation [17,29]. Nonetheless, behaviours can vary between farmers and change over time through experience [30][31][32], eventually becoming harder to predict when facing the choice to plant a perennial species.…”

Impact of farmland fragmentation on rainfed crop allocation in Mediterranean landscapes: A case study of the Lebna watershed in Cap Bon, Tunisia

“…Crop mosaics related to spatial patch arrangement and crop succession impact the sustainability of agricultural production (Jackson et al, 2007) as well as numerous biophysical processes such as water, erosion and contaminant fluxes (Joannon et al, 2006;Wohlfahrt et al, 2010;Colin et al, 2012), biotic diversity (Joannon et al, 2008) and gene fluxes (Viaud et al, 2008). Therefore, characterizing the drivers of crop allocation to fields is a prerequisite for (1) exploring and simulating spatially explicit plausible land use scenarios, and (2) quantifying the subsequent ecosystem services and disservices Rizzo et al, 2013). As discussed in previous studies, land use pattern dynamics on agricultural landscapes result from crop allocation rules that are defined at the farm scale and that drive both the successions of crops over several years and the annual distributions of crops among farmlands (Joannon et al, 2008;Thenail et al, 2009;Castellazzi et al, 2010;Houet et al, 2010;Sorel et al, 2010;Schaller et al, 2012;Stoebner and Lant, 2014).…”

Typology of organic management styles in a cash-crop region using a multi-criteria method

“…Our approach conceptually models organic farmers' technical practices. We combined this approach with that of landscape agronomy, considering the technical/territorial relations and logical rules expressed by farmers and rural territory actors (Benoit et al 2012;Rizzo et al 2013). However, this study neither analysed environmental nor productive performance, nor farmers' acquisition of information on a specific crop, as Casagrande et al (2012) have done.…”