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The integrated farming system (IFS) is a holistic farming approach specially designed for small/marginal farmers to enhance the system productivity, profitability, and employment generation of their farm, ultimately ensuring their food and nutrition security for their livelihood. The mechanism of IFS offers various ecosystem services making farms environment‐friendly, sustainable, and climate‐resilient. IFS is characterized by the allocation of different agricultural components systematically in a single farm performing synergistically among themselves making the farm more productive, healthy, biodiversity enriched, and eco‐friendly than simplified farms. Therefore, this review paper represents an extensive analysis of existing literature on IFS exploring its concept, components, and need, and emphasizing its potential for higher system productivity, profitability, and employment generation in a sustainable manner. Moreover, it develops a conceptualization of the relationship among different agricultural components in a single farm exploring its role in ecosystem services (reducing greenhouse gases, carbon sequestration, nutrient recycling, improving soil health, and biodiversity conservation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maximising resource‐use efficiency, productivity and environmental sustainability are all fundamental requirements to raise global food production by ~70 per cent in order to feed a world population of ~9.7 billion people by 2050. Perhaps the most vital resource within our capacity to achieve this goal is our soil. Broadly, the fundamental question concerns whether or not satisfying this production demand will accelerate soil degradation, climate change, and the loss of soil carbon stocks. This paper builds upon the outputs of the UK Charity 'Food & Farming Futures' (chaired by Lord Curry of Kirkharle) virtual workshop held on 23 March 2021, entitled 'Capturing the Potential of Soil'. The event focussed on the link between soil health, primarily soil organic carbon (SOC), and agricultural productivity. Supported with commentaries by Professor Pete Smith (University of Aberdeen and Science Director of the Scottish Climate Change Centre of Expertise) and Professor Steve McGrath (Head of Sustainable Agricultural Sciences at Rothamsted Research), specific focus will be given to the research challenges within the UK's ability to improve soil health and functionality, the implementation priorities that must be held in order to improve soil management by 2050 and what the potential co‐benefits could be. These co‐benefits were scattered across environmental, economic, social and political issues, yet they may be summarised into six primary co‐benefits: developing natural capital, climate change mitigation, carbon trading, improvements in crop yield, animal performance and human health (nutrition). Additionally, the main barriers to improved soil management practices are centred on knowledge exchange‐regarding agri‐environmental techniques—whilst the most impactful solutions rely on soil monitoring, reporting and verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global warming has become one of the major challenges in maintaining global food security. This paper reviews the impacts of climate change on fourteen strategic crops for eight sub-Saharan Africa countries. Climate change is projected to increase median temperature by 1.4-5.5°C and median precipitation by −2% to 20% by the end of the 21st century. However, large levels of uncertainty exist with temporal and spatial variability of rainfall events. The impact of climate change on crop yields in the region is largely negative. Among the grain crops, wheat is reported as the most vulnerable crop, for which up to 72% of the current yield is projected to decline. For other grain crops, such as maize, rice and soybean, up to 45% yield reductions are expected by the end of this century. Two grain crops, millet and sorghum, are more resilient to climate change for which projected impacts on crop yields are <20%. Root crops, such as sweet potato, potato and cassava are projected to be less affected than the grain crops with changes to crop yields ranging from about −15% to 10%. For the two major export crops, tea and coffee, up to 40% yield loss is expected due to the reduction in suitable areas caused by temperature increase. Similar loss of suitable areas is also expected for banana and sugarcane production, however, this reduction is due to rainfall variability in lowland areas. Other crops such as cotton and sugarcane are projected to be more susceptible to precipitation variation that will vary significantly in the region. In order to mitigate the long-term impacts of climate change on agricultural sectors, the development of small-scale irrigation systems and water harvesting structures seems promising, however, affordability of such measures remains a key issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]