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Cultivating water markets is an urgent task related to the sustainable use of water resources. With the intention of promoting water conservation, China has been actively exploring and fostering a water rights market since the turn of the century. This paper discusses whether water rights trading (WRT) promotes water conservation in agriculture using the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 1999 to 2018, settling 2014 as the beginning of water rights trading policy. National water rights pilots and provincial water rights pilots are selected as the subjects of this study, and the DID method is used for basic analysis and mechanistic analysis. This paper includes three major findings: (1) agricultural water use (AWU) in the water rights pilots were significantly lower by 992.7 million m3 compared to non-pilot areas, a proportional decrease of about 8.04%. (2) water rights market has a stronger effect on saving water in areas with high and low AWU than medium AWU; national pilots have stronger impact compared to provincial pilots; also, the policy has the stronger impact in the regions with higher precipitation. (3) the two main channels of water-saving effects from the policy are the promotion of agricultural technology innovation and the water rights transfer to high water consuming industries. This paper shows that water rights trading can reduce agricultural water use, providing valuable insights for current and future water management in China.

Servicizing has been identified as a business strategy that may contribute to the improvement of the environmental performance of economic activities. This paper analyses the organisational and environmental effects of servicizing in the farming sector. In particular, a case study of three Galician dairy farms which become members of cooperatives that provide them with farm machinery, heifer breeding and feeding services is carried out. The paper begins by building upon existing theoretical literature concerning servicizing and its contribution to sustainability. Then, the Compound Method Based on Financial Accounts (MC3) is used to assess the changes in the carbon footprint (CF) of the farms included in the study both before and after their integration into cooperatives. By means of servicizing the farms are released from the burden of having to make certain major investments and from having to undertake several specialised activities; in consequence they have more time and more resources to devote to their focal activity. In addition to products, the farms receive high quality services that help them to improve their efficiency and competitiveness. The paper shows a positive association between the shift to servicizing and the farms' improvement of eco-efficiency. In particular, the carbon footprint measured in relation to the number of litres of raw milk produced by each farm decreases in all three cases (within the range 16%–28%) for the period 2002–2011.

Agricultural machinery (AM) is an important input in the agricultural process. It, thus, has an impact on achieving sustainable agriculture. This paper tackles the question of developing a process for the design of sustainable AM and its associated service ecosystem in the context of small farms of developing countries. The design and development efforts of agricultural mechanization in these contexts are preoccupied with concerns for the cost of the AM, increasing cropping intensity and reducing input costs like labor, seeds, and fertilizers. They push towards the timely accomplishment of tasks, reduction in post-harvest losses, and enhancement of crop output, resulting in increased farm income. However, how these are accomplished more often results in several detrimental effects on the farmland and the overall environment. Also, in the long run, if these approaches are not designed, manufactured, marketed, operated, serviced, and disposed of with due diligence on the sustainability of the overall agroecosystem, disruptions in the socio-economic fabric of the local agriculture-based economy can occur. This paper examines if the current sustainability-orienting design (SoD) approaches, in the form of guidelines or approaches, address sustainability holistically (on the social, economic, and environmental dimensions) during the design process. At the design phase, we consider the entire life cycle of these AM and its associated ecosystem. The life cycle here includes the following stages: design, development, manufacturing, sale, use, repair, maintenance, and end-of-life. In the paper, we first present a review of existing SoD approaches and guidelines from the domain of agriculture and design for sustainability. From the domain of agriculture, we found lifecycle assessment-based methods with a strong focus on the environmental dimension. We also identified some researchers suggesting the need for a holistic approach and attempting analysis and design of agricultural machinery using integrated approaches like the product-service systems (PSS) approach. From the domain of design for sustainability, we identified that SoD approaches from sustainable PSS design and life cycle assessment domains are apt for the given context. Then, we picked up one methodology from sustainable PSS design domain called Methodology for System Design for Sustainability (MSDS). We also picked up a life cycle assessment based design toolkit called ICS toolkit. We checked their applicability for designing sustainable AM and its associated service ecosystem and identified the pros, cons, and gaps in them. The case study - design of a two-wheeled power tiller-based bed planter and its associated service ecosystem for small farms of Bangladesh were used for the same. Drawing insights, we conclude the need for an appropriate SoD approach that combines three perspectives: sustainable PSS design, sustainable agriculture and environmentally sustainable product design. We next propose a possible SoD methodology for the same. The novelty of this research lies in bringing together the knowledge and expertise from two domains, agriculture, and product design. We use this combination to devise an SoD methodology that addresses sustainability holistically for the design of sustainable AM and its associated service ecosystem.

This paper is based upon research designed to investigate the Sicilian red peach production system within two phases. The first regarded application of Life Cycle Assessment to investigate, at the farm level, the red peach production system in eastern Sicily by using one ha of peach orchard as the functional unit, while the second paper in this series will be focussed upon both environmental improvement assessment and sensitivity analysis. In this context, this paper reports on results from the first phase of the research and, therefore, highlights the inventory and the highest impact processes associated with the analysed system. The topic was addressed because agriculture is responsible for major environmental impacts, which must be reduced. The literature review provided insights into deficiencies in environmental assessments in the fruit production sector, especially within the peach and nectarine sectors. The researchers worked closely with an Eastern Sicilian red peach farmer and had access to in-depth data, which were analysed to identify and quantify hotspots that can be improved to enhance environmental and economic sustainability of red peach production in this region. The researchers documented that the largest impacts were due to irrigation due to large volumes of water and energy used. There are opportunities to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions by improving irrigation practices and in the production and usage of agricultural machinery. Other impacts were found to be due to land transformation, fertiliser and pesticide production and usage.

For many agricultural commodity sectors, efforts to meet international obligations regarding emissions reduction are increasing. The Australian cotton industry has already made advances in this regard and the high yields associated with Australian cotton production dramatically minimise greenhouse gas emissions intensity. However, certainty about the quantum of greenhouse gas emissions and the relative contribution of different components of the emissions profile is somewhat unclear; and opportunities for farm-level practice change have not been fully explored. The objectives of this paper were to, (a) build a robust greenhouse gas emissions profile for the product-chain of Australian cotton fibre (lint) grown in northwest New South Wales, (b) using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), compare the relative contributions of the different industries involved in the product-chain of cotton fibre (e.g. fertiliser producers, cotton farmers, cotton ginning plants) and (c) assess the effects of an array of on-farm mitigation options. Testing the various management options provides information for growers and policy-makers about the relative emissions reduction benefits possible. Additionally, we compared results of previous Australian cotton production studies using similar assumptions and extrapolated the emissions profile to a national scale, with the intention of informing commodity and carbon markets. The foreground data for the study were for the three production seasons from 2011-2012 to 2013–2014 in northwest New South Wales, with a functional unit of one tonne of cotton lint at port. We also drew upon published data, survey data, scientific literature and Australian and international databases. To ensure consistency between our approach and that applied to meet international emissions reporting obligations, we applied emissions formulae and factors from the Australian National Inventory Report, except where more specific published data were available. We assumed that 96% of production was from irrigated systems, with 85% of irrigation water pumped by diesel-powered irrigation pumps and a median irrigated yield of 10.3 bales per ha. We tested the sensitivity of the resulting emissions profile to a wide array of enterprise assumptions and calculation variables. The climate change impact of cotton lint on a cradle-to-port basis was 1601 kg CO2e per tonne of cotton lint. The ‘hot-spots’ within the emissions profile included the production and use of synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilisers (46% of emissions), the production and use of electricity and diesel used for irrigation (10%) and the production and use of diesel for farm machinery (9%). Farm level management options with potential to minimise life cycle GHG emissions were: reducing N fertiliser rate from a commercial rate of 255 kg N/ha to 240 kg N/ha or 180 kg N/ha (2.6% and 13.2% emissions reduction); use of controlled-release and stabilised N fertilisers (5.9% reduction), changing from diesel to solar-powered irrigation pumps (8.1% reduction), changing from diesel to biofuel-powered farm machinery (3.4% reduction), changing from continuous cotton to a cotton-legume crop rotation (3.9% reduction) and use of N fertigation (2.1% reduction). Whilst we focused on farm-level mitigation strategies, these changes were placed in the context of the cradle-to-gate system, to account for associated changes in pre-farm and post-farm emissions.

Macro and micro institutions have received considerable attention from institutional theory in the analysis of organizational performance. The role played by meso-institutions has hardly been addressed. This article draws on recent institutionalist approaches which introduce meso-institutions as a third layer of the analysis. Meso-institutions on the adoption of environmental technologies is the focus of attention. The Brazilian policy on climate change offered an opportunity for this investigation. Different meso-institutions were created or adjusted to accelerate and monitor the actions and targets of the Brazilian Low Carbon Agriculture Plan. The effects of these meso-institutions on both farmers’ decision to adopt Integrated Crop-Livestock Systems (ICLS) and farms performance were estimated through a Simultaneous Equation System (SES). The analyses were based on a survey sample of 175 farmers from the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Our main results corroborate the hypothesis that meso-institutions are of utmost importance to improve resource utilization by the farmers. Economic incentives, risk reduction, capacity building and knowledge sharing provided by meso-institutions had significant impacts on the probability of adopting ICLS and on farms performance. These results suggest that meso-institutions can foster a favorable environment for the adoption of more sustainable technologies at farm-level. The paper innovates in the use of SES to investigate the impacts of meso-institutions on resource allocation decisions of Brazilian cattle farmers. Our empirical findings can contribute to the research agenda on meso-institutions and sustainable technology adoption.

A typical supply chain is composed of three main echelons: upstream, mid-stream and downstream. In the case of sugarcane, the upstream echelon includes several activities, such as growth, harvest, and transportation to mills. As multiple authors have pointed out the importance of proper scheduling for these supply chain echelons, as well as the need to develop more realistic optimization models, the present investigation proposes a multi-objective stochastic optimization model for upstream scheduling, with a sustainable approach. The model involves robust planning for harvest, maintenance, and transportation. It also sets the operations schedule for workforce, agricultural machinery, and vehicles. In contrast to previous contributions regarding sugarcane supply chain optimization, the effect of sugarcane yield uncertainty on harvest scheduling and resource allocation is incorporated. Further, upstream operations performance was analyzed, using a sustainable approach. A real-life cases study is examined in this paper. We used compromise programing approach to seek the best trade-off with respect to the utilization of different harvesting methods. Linked to the above, our computational results show that the sugarcane harvesting should be mostly carry out using mechanical method. Through the use of harvesting machinery, the total operation costs and negative environmental is significantly smaller compared to the manual harvesting. Results also show that social goals (job creation) is positively impact by greater utilization of manual harvesting. Most importantly, our computational outcomes are useable to find a proper balance between mechanical and manual harvesting; achieving at the same time, the best possible performance values for the studied sustainable goals.

The use of vehicles to control pests and crop diseases is needed to maintain agricultural production. This paper describes how to design and implement a low cost intelligent telecontrol system applied for agricultural machinery that are designed for use in places where human presence is not adequate, such as pesticide spraying tasks in farming environments as greenhouses. The intelligent system designed basically consists of these parts: States Encoding, Console Automaton, Vehicle Automaton, Communication System and Security of Communications. This system has been developed with a special-purpose UHF narrow band modem that interchanges digital operative commands/states from the console to the vehicle. The intelligent telecontrol system acts as a security system to protect against outsiders, and loss of communications due to fading or others interference. The originality of this system is based on the fact that it is 10 times cheaper than autonomous systems; those systems need electronic systems, GPS, a complex sensorial system, and a beforehand mapping performed on the new work environment. Related to classic remote control, our system protects from potential oversights of the operator. In addition, in the proposed system, the vehicle state is shown in the console, due the bidirectional communications. The system was successfully applied in prototype vehicle used for spraying tasks, and the result shows that the system operated stably and has confirmed the effectiveness of this intelligent telecontrol system. The proposed technology will help providing solutions for humans and robots working together in agricultural environments considered to be harmful to humans.