Nitrogen is an important input to agricultural production but also detrimentally affects the environmental quality of air, soil and water. Identifying the determinants of nitrate pollution and in turn defining sensible performance indicators to design, enforce and monitor regulatory policies is...

In this paper, an ordered probit model is used to assess the factors that affect the probability of livestock farmers having plans to adopt manure separation technology in the future. A survey, based on a postal and computerized questionnaire of representative dairy and pig farms in the...

Agriculture is the main user of the world’s water resources. Due to increasing concern on water quality and quantity, there is a growing interest to use the scarce water resources in the most efficient way to feed the growing world population. By employing a meta-analysis, this paper shows...

In modern agriculture, pesticides feature so prominently in growers’ arsenal to reduce crop damage caused by various pests and diseases. But their indiscriminate use can harm human health and the environment and, eventually, impact agricultural productivity negatively. In an era of an...

The Health Check (HC) of the European Common Agricultural Policy in 2003 sped up the process of policy reforms toward decoupled payments in order to urge agricultural production to respond to market signals. However, since decoupled payments could generate “coupled” effects on production, it...

Recently the olive sector has had important changes in Andalusia due to both the enlargement and the intensification of farming. The expansion of the olive grove in Andalusia is causing sustainability problems, not only from the socio-economic dimension (profit reduction) but environmental...

The paper aims to study the effects of reducing pesticide use by farmers in the arable sector in France and the feasibility of a policy target of reducing pesticide use by half. The originality of the approach is to combine statistical data and expert knowledge to describe low-input alternative...

Agriculture is to a large part responsible for nitrate leaching into groundwater and rivers in Germany, especially in highly intensive agricultural regions. To evaluate the link between nitrogen surpluses from agriculture and nutrient leaching into ground- and surface waters, a model network to...

Pig farming is one of the strongest polluters of water resources due to its intensive production techniques and slurry rejection. Several European countries have already introduced environmental regulations aiming at reducing the pollution caused by nitrates from agricultural sources, but not...

The aim of this paper is to set-up the algorithm for determining the degree of workability of the soil, to help the owners of family farms to plan working hours of agricultural machines, i.e. with the machine park management. The plans, which would be made by use of these algorithms and based on...