Month: August 2022

Although making a success of smart farming is already tricky and adding new complications might appear unhelpful, the task must be to recognize and confront the complexities, rather than sidestep or ignore them. The question is how to construct smart farming innovation processes that yield more effective configurations?To avoid producing misconfigured innovations, smart farming requires a reimagined innovation process. I argue the challenge is to imagine and realize an innovation process that can yield ‘emancipatory smart farming.’ Some clues of what such an innovation process might entail are provided by research on the possibilities of pursuing ‘responsible research and innovation’ in smart farming. With a focus on anticipation, inclusion, reflexivity, and responsiveness , RRI tries to respond to the new “socio-ethical dilemmas” called forth by contemporary technological developments. For example, as stated by Rose and Chilvers , “[i]n the rush to embrace smart agri-tech, we are in danger of forgetting the wider network of other innovations that play an important role, but may also affect societies in different ways” . One focal point of RRI is therefore “to stage reasoned deliberations on technological needs and concerns between historically marginalized food system actors and prominent decision makers in government” . An ambition is that RRI might become “a rubric for guiding innovation toward socially and ethically acceptable ends” . At issue is examining “interrelations between multiple co-existing innovations in sustainable agriculture [to] promote the cultivation of distributed responsibilities across wider innovation ecologies” . In the New Zealand dairy sector, for instance, RRI has recognized that smart farming will yield “adapted advisory structures, potentially leading to displaced farm staff and service providers” . Moreover, shifts associated with smart farming technologies might have a “major impact on the cultural fabric of what it means to be a farmer,” in part because they can entail “detailed monitoring by agricultural equipment makers, input suppliers, u planting gutter processors and retailers” . There are reasons to applaud RRI. It signals at least an interest in trying to integrate societal concerns in technical developments; and opens avenues for new engagements between groups that might not otherwise interact.

It is a close approximation of what an appropriate topological repertoire might look like because it emphasizes the visibility of stakeholders, actors, and material realities that otherwise can be marginalized or ignored. However, RRI in smart farming still fails to produce adequate configurations. It operates via a misplaced insistence that agricultural innovation can successfully reconfigure sociotechnical relations in one domain, without also pursuing systemic or structural change. In short, it is necessary to continue insisting on the need for reimagined smart farming innovation processes that work to sidestep the misconfigured innovations evident in today’s smart farming developments. A pertinent example of what might be possible here is the development of farm OS, which draws on activist engagements and explores how smart technologies can empower communities, through actions of solidarity and co-learning . The software helps farmers record, plan, and manage their operations. It is open-source, produced under a general public license, and is easily hackable, in contrast to proprietary farm management software. Farmers can integrate diverse tools, such as drones for capturing aerial imagery or sensors to record temperatures, and thereby retain latitude to configure their operations in astute ways. In its effort to unsettle established smart farming structures and enable farmers to take back control over the software and data they produce, farmOS resembles other efforts to hack and repair farm technologies . It also reflects a much wider societal shift whereby activists, community groups, or others in civil society embrace contemporary technologies and take advantage of the emergent affordances to pursue “productive resistance” . A key dynamic of digital life today is growing realization that ‘smart’ use of software platforms requires re-platformizing society so urban citizens as much as rural farmers can take advantage of technological affordances without reproducing a platform economy dominated by a few enormous firms . It is therefore illuminating that farmOS is part of a new partnership called Open TEAM that aims to create a platform to facilitate “soil health management for farms of all scales, geographies and production systems” . There is scope today for farmers and connected others to overcome the problems of ‘actually existing’ smart farming and the misconfigured innovations it churns out. ise from new possibilities on the technological horizon. Hitherto, a technical limitation on smart farming developments pertains to the uneven roll-out of high-speed internet access between urban and rural areas . But there is now evidence that 5G networking technologies using TV White Space or ‘frugal 5G’ could be a ‘game changer’ for rural Internet access. If there is to be a ‘what next?’ of smart farming, it will build on what we find actually existing today to create new possibilities for embedding food production within the wider ‘planetary cognitive ecology’ , with unpredictable outcomes.

One relevant near-term scenario emerges from research on the ‘internet of people’ , a term used by computer science researchers with a view to building on and improving the relatively passive ‘internet of things.’ In the “Next Generation Internet” they are exploring, the internet of things is not swept away but rather a “new reference architecture” is carefully-crafted onto it with a view to overcoming problematic features of the “current-Internet data-management paradigm [such as] constant monitoring of users’ behavior by global platforms to provide to them ‘navigation’ and filtering services to find relevant data embedded in the huge amount of available data” . The overall design calls for a “human-centric perspective” at the scale of implementation and a novel “data-management Internet paradigm” in which devices are proxies of humans and constantly exist in context and operate in self-organizing networks that create new efficiencies because the need for human decisions is minimized. Significant features include use of new 5G capabilities that enable relatively autonomous ‘device-to-device’ communications across ‘pervasive communities’ of connected users. Per an IoP manifesto , devices are designed to ‘be social,’ ‘be personalized,’ ‘be proactive,’ and ‘be predictable.’ The underlying notion is that the IoP will use new arrangements and practices to engender economic efficiencies and positive social impacts. But there is every reason to expect the types of behaviours and interactions proposed by this line of research to impact on ‘smart farming’ practices. Consider a hypothetical example of how the IoP might operate, which, in the absence of available real-world examples to use, I adapt from contributions to the IoP literature : Maxine is a dairy farmer and cheese producer. Her cheese sales are disappointing. She’s confused and worried. She searches online for new recipes. Her phone knows a new recipe or idea is needed [‘be personalized’]. It shares this info with devices belonging to Maxine’s friends [’be social’]. At a social event soon thereafter, a phone belonging to a friend of Maxine overhears2 someone called Sandy say that Maxine’s cheese reminds them of another cheese they ate on holiday in Holland. It sends Maxine’s device a message along these lines [’be social’]; shares the ingredients and recipe of the Dutch cheese [’be predictable’]; and suggests a tweaked production process [’be proactive’]. Maxine’s device also communicates with quasi-autonomous devices in the cheese cellar [’be social’] to produce a new test batch. Some months later, Maxine has produced the new cheese product. Her device then detects that Sandy will be nearby soon [’be social’] and arranges for a sample pack to be delivered to her [’be proactive’]. At the same time, Maxine’s phone arranges for sample packs to be sent to other people who match Sandy’s sociological profile [’be proactive’]. Their devices respond to say they like Maxine’s new cheese and Maxine’s phone sends them discount coupons for their next purchase [’be predictable’]. Today’s smart farming developments lay the ground for emerging operations in the IoP: devices such as phones, or sensors to measure soil moisture or temperatures, are now operating on farms all over the world; software platforms are integrating actions, collecting and analysing data, and providing pertinent information to guide decisions; and autonomous machines are already in action.

All of these arrangements of devices and sensors share information according to protocols and standards worked out in the context of today’s technological limits and possibilities. The scene is therefore set for new rounds of investment in technologies that adapt architectures and yield realities like those posed above. As such, tomorrow’s protocols and possibilities will build on the normality of devices and sensors contributing to on-farm intelligence and efficiency but with a view to delivering results impossible hitherto. As suggested by Maxine’s case, then, smart farming in the IoP still relies on human intelligence but the abilities of her farm operation to survive is upgraded and amplified by protocols and standards that grant proxy devices autonomy and intelligence to proactively prompt new connectivities and relations. Maxine’s relations with others are mediated, filtered, and ranked; her digital life draws on new affordances developing dynamically within pervasive communities operating across a proactive internet. Beyond notions of the ‘nanny state’ infusing debates about communitarian governmental action, the IoP scenario is more akin to people living with numerous devices acting like ‘guardian angels,’ planting gutter with autonomous device-to-device decision making based on assumptions about the needs and possibly the desires of the individuals ‘they’ oversee. Maxine may be conscious of decisions she makes to engage the internet and might even understand or be sent information about autonomous device-to-device activities pinging messages and moving data according to underlying protocols; but much of her social life in the IoP also unfolds without her active participation. It is a new rural scene; an image of a different society from today’s, not least because it suggests the arrival of a new cognitive ecology underpinned and driven by AI, with social relations played out in numerous colliding “regions of technical autonomy” . Taking stock of the IoP scenario, there is clearly a strong possibility that smart farming in this forthcoming context will unfold via further rounds of misconfigured innovations. The dynamics of capitalist accumulation will no doubt pervade the design of protocols, devices, and services. Per the orientation of practices within so-called “surveillance capitalism” , tech firms such as Google or Amazon – as well as agri-TNCs, with their new data science profiles – will explore opportunities in the IoP to construct a more predictable world. Their challenge will be trying to contain the latent capacities and chaos of human and non-human action within tight profitable parameters; to thereby reduce the scope for uncertainty and contingency to interrupt flows of decisions informed by populations of sensors laid out and communicating with each other according to algorithmic models of society.

However, the objective reality of space is that no computational architecture can make sufficient calculations to overcome the inherent and pervasive “chance of space” . Maxine operates in a contingency-laden context before any IoP devices arrive on the scene. What happens with digital technologies in general, and the IoP in particular, is simply now that “the chance of space swells” . In the IoP, Maxine engages a new rural scene that amplifies chaos with unpredictable outcomes. As such, unexpected dynamics might come to the fore. The distinction here is between the architecture of digital life and the actual lived experience of digital subjects, which always entails “intersections and recursive relationships” playing out via “iterative interplays” . As evidence from research on digital worlds demonstrates – and as I have discussed via reference to developments such as farmOS – contemporary and emerging digital devices and services provide affordances for subjects to use technology in unexpected ways, including for the sake of resisting oppressive social formations. In rural space, smart farming seen through the lens of IoP research might place new value on intelligent, efficient, and even to some extent ruthless practices that squeeze as much profit from land and labour. Nevertheless, and emphatically, outcomes of the technological shifts at play here remain unwritten. Like farmOS or other efforts to re-imagine smart farming technologies, the IoP might create scope for users to create new forms of cooperation, reciprocity, and solidarity. There is significant scope for further investigation into this emerging scene.

Even when we disaggregate the contract treatment by contract attributes, there is little evidence of significant differences. Yet, the plethora of null results arising from the heterogeneity analysis is informative regarding both the contracts offered to participants in the experiment and the larger non-experimental literature as a whole. The contracts offered by ESOP appear to  benefit households equally. The contracts did not disadvantage female headed households or older farmers. Nor did they advantage farmers with more experience or those who participated in training programs or were members of local farm associations. This uniformity is encouraging regarding the equity and achievability of the contracting terms that ESOP offers. In regards to the larger literature on the heterogeneous effects of contract farming, endogenous matching between principals and agents is extremely difficult to control in non-experimental settings . It may be the case that some non-experimental studies have confounded heterogeneity in contract outcomes with heterogeneity in contract participation.The final component of our analysis is to explore the robustness of our primary results to different samples, different inference, and different specifications. Table 9 summarizes these robustness checks and their results. The table also points to where in the Appendix the complete results for each check can be found. Our first check is whether our inference is robust when we account for attrition. Since some differences do exist between attritors and nonattritors in our sample, we calculate bounds for our estimates following Lee and accounting for the stratified and clustered design of the experiment. All point estimates for the treatment effect are bounded away from zero .

These results suggest that any potential bias introduced by differences between attriting farmers and returning farmers is small relative to our estimated effect sizes. Next, we check whether our inference is robust to corrections that account for testing multiple hypotheses. We adjust p-values for the FWER using the Bonferroni , Holm and List et al. correction, rolling bench along with adjusting for the FDR using Anderson sharpened q-values. Corrections for our main results are in Table B6 and Table B8 in the Appendix. In general, there is no change in significance from any of these corrections. In cases where our point estimates are significant, they remain significant when accounting for multiple hypothesis testing. Given the grouped nature of the randomization, leaving us with 107 treatment units, it is possible that asymptotic inference is unreliable. As an alternative method for interrogating the robustness of our results, we implement a randomization inference procedure outlined in Heβ . Where classical inference assumes the treatment is fixed and the sample is a random draw, randomization inference assumes the sample is fixed and the assignment to treatment is random. For each ANCOVA regression with covariates, we randomly permute the treatment indicator 5000 times, accounting for the stratified and clustered design of the experiment, which allows us to build a reference sample under the sharp null hypothesis of no treatment effect. We can then compare the distribution of outcomes when the hypothetical treatment effect is zero with the observed treatment effect and calculate p-values. Table B6 and Table B7 in the Appendix present p-values from the analytical standard errors presented in the body of the paper along with p-values calculated from the randomization inference procedure. Similar to our adjustments for attrition and multiple hypothesis testing, randomization inference does not move our results from significant to not significant for the pooled treatment. When it comes to the treatment effects for each contract type, there is a change in the effect of T1 on rice area, which is no longer significant. Besides this case, all other significant treatment effects remain significant, though at reduced levels.

Our next two checks are concerned with the robustness of our results to difference specifications. In Table 6 we presented results from regressions which included indicators for each treatment. We now conduct a pairwise comparison of each treatment against the control .Additionally, the OLS estimate without covariates of the effect of T1 on income per capita is no longer significant. There is no change in significance for any of the other variables and specifications. In Table 7 we presented Bonferroni-adjusted Wald tests comparing co-efficient sizes across treatments. We can make this same comparison in a pairwise fashion, directly testing T2 against T1, T3 against T1, and T3 against T2 . Any differences that were significant using the Wald test remain significant in the pairwise comparisons. However, we find that three cases where the Wald test failed to reject the null can be rejected in a pairwise comparison. Rice area for those in T2 is significantly less than T1 and income per capita is significantly larger for those in T3 compared to both T2 and T1. In each of these cases the p-value of the Wald test fell just below the 90 percent critical value and the switch to a direct comparison increases the precision of the estimates. Our final robustness check is to test our results using alternative measures of welfare. First, we disaggregate income into rice income, farm income other than from rice, and non-farm income. This allows us to determine if households are reallocating effort away from other sources of income and towards rice production. Tables B16 and B17 in the Appendix present results for the pooled treatment and each treatment arm. The results are consistent across tables: the treatment increases rice income but does not have a significant effect on other income sources. However, there is a small but insignificant negative effect on non-rice farm income. Despite this, it appears that contract farming increases household income without reducing other sources of income. Second, since income is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, we estimate treatment effects on two food security metrics.

The first is the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale and the second is the Food Consumption Score . The HFIAS measures a household’s feelings and perceptions of food insecurity and is the preferred measure of USAID. The FCS measures how often a household consumes food items in different food groups and is the preferred measure of the World Food Programme.Our results are generally robust to these alternative welfare measures . Farming contracts increase the FCS as do all three individual contracts. However, there is little evidence that farming contracts reduce the HFIAS. While some of the treatment effects on HFIAS are significant, they tend not to be robust to adjustments accounting for multiple hypothesis testing or attrition. Third, we estimate treatment effects on a back-of-the-envelope calculation of profits from rice production.Our data contains detailed inputs on rice production, including labor time. However, it lacks detailed price data on hired and household wages as well as input data on total farm production. Despite these limitations in the data, and the long-standing problem of valuing family labor, we can compute a rough estimate of profits earned from rice production. We use three different wages to calculate a range of rice profits. Based on data from ESOP, we calculate profits at a “low wage rate” of 1500 CFA per day and a “high wage rate” of 2000 CFA per day. We also calculate profit using self-reported “cost of labor” for rice production. Using these three sources to value both hired and family labor, we can create a range of back-of-the envelope calculations for rice profits per hectare. As can be seen in Tables B20 and B21 in the Appendix, farm contracts increase rice profits when self-reported labor is used but have no significant effect when we use the low and high wage data from ESOP. We believe that the lack of impact on profit using ESOP-reported wages is due to a lack of precision in calculated profit, and, as a result, a lack of precision in estimates. Using self-reported costs to calculate wage rates, standard errors on estimates are always below 1.0. However, standard errors on estimates using ESOP data are frequently above 2.0. We conclude that there is suggestive, though far from conclusive, evidence that the contracts did in fact increase profits.The results from our field experiment present consistent evidence regarding the impact of contract farming, though somewhat unexpected insights regarding the impact of different contract attributes. Participation in contract farming, or at least the contracts ESOP offered to rice farmers in our study, has a positive and significant impact on area planted, yield, market participation, and income. Obviously, this should not be interpreted as definitive evidence that all contract farming is beneficial to the agent, as contract terms will vary based on context, grow table hydroponic bargaining power, and the objective function of the principal. While the overall positive effect of a farm contract was expected, we did not anticipate some of the differences in outcomes across contract type.

In particular, contracts that provide extension training seemed to add no value above and beyond the fixed-price contract. Evidence from comparisons in Table 6 and our robustness checks all show that the provision of extension training frequently resulted in lower outcomes relative to the other contracts. Similarly, the estimates of treatment effects on input use does not reveal substantial differences between contracts that provided extension services and the contract that did not. Three factors may explain these results. First, extension training is expected to increase technical efficiency. However, many smallholder farmers are resource-poor and may be unable to apply the knowledge they have gained. For instance, training regarding best practices for the application of fertilizer when the farmer cannot afford to buy the fertilizer is time ill spent. Second, the farmers in our experiment had very basic levels of education. The extension training developed with ESOP may have been pitched at too high a level to be effective. Third, it may be the case that the extension training was too broad. Recent RCT evidence from Kenya and Nigeria has shown that significant improvements can be made to agricultural outcomes when targeted or personalized advice is offered . By comparison, broad or generalized recommendations typically provide no value added to farmers. That extension training was ineffective in our study is disappointing but not abnormal. Feder et al. , Bellemare and Jones and Kondylis all provide evidence that extension services in developing countries often prove ineffective in producing positive and significant outcomes for smallholder farmers. Furthermore, in many developing countries, extension services focus more on cash crops , neglecting staple food crops such as rice . While extension training proved to provide little added value, the simple fixed-price contracts turned out to produce particularly large impacts. Across multiple comparison groups, the fixed-price contract resulted in outcomes statistically indistinguishable from the contract that added input loans and extension training to the price guarantee. Focusing on the results of the Wald tests in Table 7, the contract that only offered a fixed price had similar effect sizes for area planted, yields, and income relative to the contract that added extension services and input loans. Market participation was the only outcome variable where the fixed price contract failed to meet or exceed the effect size of one or more of the other contracts. This result is striking in its simplicity and enormously encouraging in its implications for contract farming and rural transformation. It implies that the primary issue facing these farmers is output price risk. Though our experimental design does not allow for a clean test of the effect of eliminating price risk, since all contracts include non-price attributes, the preponderance of evidence suggests that providing a contract that eliminates price risk allows farmers to, on their own, make the necessarily investment to increase their rice area, increase their productivity, and, by selling more rice into the market, increase their income. Our results regarding the role of output price risk closely align with evidence presented in Michelson et al. and Michelson regarding contract farming schemes in Nicaragua. There the authors study contracts offered by Walmart and other supermarkets to purchase produce from smallholder farmers. They find that farmers who receive contracts isolating them from fluctuations in out price take on more credit, farm more intensively, produce more, and earn a higher income.

Various elements must be considered when estimating the cost of a crop. It divides agricultural costs into five categories and provides calculations for each. It also gives examples of how to figure out how much a crop cost. It is a theoretical article that always guide the implementation of estimating the cost of cultivation. This theoretical study was used in the proposed model to calculate the cost of cultivation. It was very helpful as it provided elementary description to calculate the costs for cultivation. The formulas proposed in this study was used in the proposed system to estimate the costs till the year 2028. From 2004 to 2015, the goal of this research is to evaluate the gap between various costs and gross value of output , as well as the trends of input utilization and critical factors for gross value of output of gram crop across top production states. The findings demonstrate so after 2009–2010, all states’ GVO and overall costs increased significantly. The commencement of the Government of India’s agricultural waiver scheme in 2008–2009 was found to be the cause of a large increase in operational costs from 2009 to 2010. It was also obvious that the compound annual growth rate was larger in 2009–2010 than in 2014–2015 when comparing 2004–2005 to 2007–2008. Profit margins were high in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, indicating a cost-cutting trend. This work provided a comparative study about the costs between different states of India. The proposed work has used Ensemble regression algorithms that is used to forecast the costs till 2028. It provides a comparative study of a crop for a specific state from 2010– 2028. Hence the user would be able to identify the trends of costs from the year 2010–2028.

The forecasting is explicitly applied on the India’s cost of cultivation survey data from 2010–2018. This provides an elaborative view of operational cost,led grow lights fixed cost, total cost, Cost Concepts were displayed in form of a graph for better understanding of the trends of the costs. Agriculture is currently a dominant use of the land and a major driver of environmental change and thus agricultural landscapes are key to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals , such as food security and environmental sustainability . As social-ecological systems, agricultural landscapes reflect the intertwined interaction between humans and nature through time . The contribution of agricultural landscapes to society goes beyond provisioning ecosystem services . Farmlands can contribute with a wide range of other key ecosystem services to society such as regulating and cultural , while providing habitat for biodiversity . However, the social-ecological outcomes of farmlands relate to the characteristics of supporting landscapes, which ultimately reflect the management practices, i.e. farming systems prevailing at the landscape level . Distinct farming systems are characterized by different field- and farm-level agricultural practices, reflecting farmers’ decisions on crop selection, livestock management and/or the maintenance of non-crop elements . Managed under intensive FS, agricultural landscapes contribute mainly to food and fibre production, but at high costs for the natural environment . Agricultural intensification has been pinpointed as major driver of land use change, causing landscape homogenization, habitat degradation and loss, and the decline of species of conservation interest . Conversely, farmlands managed under low-intensive farming systems, especially those designated in Europe as High Nature Value farmlands , have been highlighted for contributing to a wide range of ecosystem services, beyond support to biodiversity .

Characterized by low levels of agrochemical inputs and livestock stoking, minimal mechanization and the rotational use of the land, HNV farming systems maximize the use of territorial resources for agricultural production, while promoting landscape level heterogeneity. Therefore, the maintenance of HNV farming systems has been related to the occurrence of species and/or habitats, among which some of conservation concern . The European Union Common Agricultural Policy has been recognizing the role of agricultural landscapes to meet societal environmental concerns, namely by explicitly defining specific practices that farmers’ should observe or by supporting low intensity FS fostering the nature value of agricultural landscapes . Overall, CAP instruments align with other EU policy instruments such as Nature Directives and the EU Biodiversity Strategy, which, among other objectives, aim to include agricultural areas under high-diversity landscape features and organic farming management through uptaking agro-ecological practices for a positive contribution of agriculture to biodiversity and ecosystem services . Still, while the link between agriculture and biodiversity and ecosystem services has been widely described, data-driven research assessing such relationship at the landscape level across taxonomic groups and services is still scarce. Data availability is a major limitation to advance knowledge on how farming systems shape biodiversity and ecosystem services at the landscape level . The Integrated Administration and Control System database, managed by EU Member States paying agencies to monitor and control CAP payments, has been highlighted as a potential source of information on farmers’ practices at the farm-level . Coupled with the Land Parcel Information System , a spatially-explicit identification system for agricultural plots, IACS provide a high spatial and temporal resolution dataset integrating several dimensions of agricultural management, such livestock stocking, crops and land use . The value of IACS goes beyond the support to assess and monitor the impacts of CAP instruments. This comprehensive source of high-resolution data has been increasingly highlighted for its potential to support data-driven research in agricultural landscapes . Examples include mapping HNVf , analysis of crop and landscape diversity , land use change , definition and analysis of farming systems , or modelling exercises to assess the impacts of policies on FS and biodiversity . However, studies using this detailed source of data reflecting agricultural management have seldom been performed to assess and monitor patterns of biodiversity and the delivery of ecosystem services at the landscape level. Farming systems conceptual and methodological approaches have been pointed as suitable tools to explore the links between farmers’ practices and biodiversity and ecosystem services .

Considering farms as systems and units of analysis, a FS includes a set of farms sharing similar characteristics, namely in what concerns land type, labor and means of production, reflected in cropping and livestock subsystems combinations and underlying management decisions such as livestock rates and crop types, or the use of fertilizers. Such characteristics result from farmers’ decisions, which are jointly driven by policies , socio-economic factors and by biophysical conditions . Ultimately, farmers’ decisions are reflected as the dominance of a given farming system at the landscape level . Thus, exploring the links between FS and biodiversity and ecosystem services is essential to improve our understanding on the impacts of agriculture on biodiversity in landscapes under different agricultural management. In this research, we contribute to advance the state-of-the-art, by exploring the link between FS and patterns of biodiversity at the landscape level. To do that, we used IACS data to identify and characterize the spatial distribution of farming systems in a region in NW Spain and explored the relationships between the composition of FS, and species and habitats richness. More specifically, we aimed to answer the following research questions: Can IACS be used to map and characterize different farming systems at the landscape-level? and, Is the occurrence of specific FS linked with higher levels of biodiversity? Results of the analysis between FS and targeted biodiversity indicators are discussed for the Galician region, and implications drawn with respect to the assessment and monitoring of patterns of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, including High Nature Value farmlands, across the EU. Our study area covers Galicia, an administrative NUTS 2 region located in North-western Spain, between 41◦ N and 44◦ N latitude, and, 9.5◦ W and 6.5◦ W longitude with a total area of 29,575 km2 . Most of the region is characterized by an oceanic/dry summer climate and is located in the Atlantic biogeographical region, with only a small area located in the south-east Galicia integrated in the Mediterranean region. Characterized by an elevation ranging from sea level to ~2100 m in the western mountains and a hilly topography, roughly 36% of Galician municipalities have been declared as less-favoured areas according to the Council Directive 75/268/EEC . The biophysical characteristics and historical uses of the land of Galicia are reflected in a considerable natural capital, recognized by the designation of several Natura 2000 areas, including 16 Special Protection Areas and 59 Special Areas of Conservation . SPAs cover 101,135 ha and SACs 374,435 ha, corresponding to 3.4% and 12.6% of all the area, respectively. For the last half of the twentieth century, Galicia underwent a polarization between intensification of agriculture and forest activities in the best soils and marginalization of remote, vertical grow system mountainous areas, following the trends observed at the EU scale .

The specialization of agriculture targeted mainly dairy production, while in the forest sector focused fast growing species for timber. Thus, despite representing less than 6% of total area in Spain, Galicia currently accounts for about 40% of dairy and 50% of timber production in the country. Utilized agricultural area occupies about 30% of total area of the region. Holdings are mostly small family farms, considerably smaller than the Spanish average . Moreover, there is a large fragmentation of land property , implying that most farmers manage a rather high number of different plots of land. Thus, despite a trend for agricultural intensification along the last decades, the relatively small scale of farming units and the fragmentation of farm holdings in numerous plots of land contribute to the complexity and heterogeneity of the landscape. Together with a relatively high density of linear landscape elements, these aspects contribute to a High Nature Value linked to the occurrence of cultural landscapes in the area . IACS and LPIS data on farm-level management was provided by the regional managing authority . Linked to LPIS, IACS provides spatially-explicit information on the geographic location, area and crops produced and the number and type of livestock for all agricultural plots managed by Galician farmers’ and declared under the CAP payments. For this study, the dataset contained information for the year 2015 about 1,190,714 parcels, declared by 33, 009 farms . To assure statistical confidentiality, all farms in the dataset are identified by a randomly generated code and as no relation to any farm registration codes. Information about the distribution of EU Habitats of Community Interest in the region was derived from data available from the previous work of Ramil-Rego et al. . This data is the most up-to-date data source regarding the diagnosis, description and distribution of habitat types listed in Annex I of the Habitats Directive for the study area. Moreover, it constitutes the source of data for the Galician Natura 2000 sites regional Management Plan , and for the Standard Data Forms of the designated SACs in the region. While detailed habitat mapping has been carried out exclusively for Natura 2000 sites and their surroundings, records for the presence/absence of habitats in a 10 × 10 km UTM grid were available for the whole region from the same project. Here, we considered all terrestrial Annex I habitats listed for the study area , assuming that agricultural practices may have direct and indirect impacts on their occurrence at the landscape level. We used this information to calculate the total number of Annex I habitats and the total number of priority habitats recorded per 10 × 10 km grid cell . The diversity of species of conservation interest was derived from the Biodiversity Data Bank maintained by the Institute of Agrarian Biodiversity and Rural Development of the University of Santiago de Compostela. This data bank is the most updated source regarding species occurrence for Galicia, and includes information about the suitable habitats for each species, according to the methodology proposed by Ramil Rego et al. . Species of conservation interest were selected . Then, and converging with the objectives of our research, we selected only protected species associated with agro-ecosystems . Our final dataset included 119 protected species, from which 8 plants, 1 invertebrate, 11 amphibians, 13 reptiles, 80 birds, and 6 mammals . While unbalanced, the final set of species reflects the uneven number of species of conservation interest listed across the targeted taxonomic groups for the study area .

In tropical grasslands, moderate grazing led to soil carbon storage and resulted in greater productivity and soil water-holding capacity, potentially enhancing grassland resilience to climate change . Mixed grazing of different livestock species at moderate levels promoted higher diversity and ecosystem multi-functionality . Soussana et al. , who accounted for greenhouse gas budgets at nine European grassland sites, found that grasslands have the potential to offset a significant proportion of global emissions of greenhouse gases as a result of livestock grazing. These findings have significant implications for achieving carbon neutrality and carbon peaking. Altogether, integrating grassland grazing into existing livestock farming systems in China will undoubtedly meet the increasing human demand for high-quality foods and valuable ecosystem services.Despite the potential positive contributions to humans, grassland-based ruminant farming systems in China still face severe problems, such as low production output , greenhouse gas emissions caused by ruminants due to low-quality forage feeding , and grassland degradation caused by overgrazing . We determined that the key reason for the emergence of these problems lies in the lack of knowledge and techniques for integration of nutrition manipulation and grazing manipulation. In grassland grazing systems, herbivore foraging behaviors are a central feature in the animaleplant interface . Herbivore foraging selection can directly influence plant community composition and diversity by changing competition among plants, affecting grassland ecological processes and ecosystem functions. Simultaneously, foraging selections of livestock under grazing conditions directly determine the nutrient supply resulting from grazing and forage resources, hydroponic dutch buckets which are essential for nutrition management decisions.

Therefore, accurately determining the diet selection of grazing ruminants relative to available herbage is necessary for future developments of these techniques. However, complex variables create significant challenges for accurately predicting the foraging selection behaviors of ruminants under grazing conditions, making predictions extremely difficult. The challenges we explore are not exhaustive but are focused on key factors in developing sustainable grassland-based ruminant farming systems.Animals may selectively adjust their dietary composition according to their individual experiences, nutritional status, and physiological status. Previous studies have shown that ruminants tend to choose specific plants and plant parts when grazing . Decisions about what to eat are based on expected rewards and previous experiences, affecting an animal’s food preferences . In utero and early life experiences of livestock may alter food preferences through elusive epigenetic effects that drive the voluntary forage intake of animals later in life . For instance, Chadwick et al. found that lambs exposed to salt bush in utero grew faster and handled greater salt loads than lambs born from ewes grazed on mono-cultures of introduced grasses. Wiedmeier et al. demonstrated that cattle exposed to high-fiber forages early in life showed higher nitrogen retention and greater abilities to digest fiber during adulthood than cattle reared on low-fiber diets. Available evidence has also suggested that ruminants selectively balance their diet according to their nutritional requirements. For instance, grazing ruminants maximize their energy intake through selective feeding on forages, during a day , or within a specific feeding schedule . Mineral-deficient cattle and sheep have been observed eating soil, licking urine patches, eating fecal matter, or eating dead rabbits, whereas animals without mineral deficiencies may sniff or lick these items but rarely consume them . Furthermore, ruminants may selectively feed based on their satiety and changing physiological needs, such as growth, lactation, pregnancy, parturition, and weaning .

Herbivores selectively consume individual plants based on their chemical composition, determined by secondary compounds, nutritional ingredients, and flavor substances. Typically, herbivores prefer to feed on plants containing only modest amounts of secondary metabolites. In small quantities, these compounds reduce bloating and improve protein utilization, immune responses, resistance to gastrointestinal nematodes, and reproductive efficiency . However, excessive volumes of secondary metabolites in grassland plant species limit the forage chosen for ingestion by grazing livestock. For example, goats selectively reduce their intake of forages with a greater composition of secondary compounds such as tannins . Lambs choose to reduce meal size and increase meal intervals when their diet is high in terpenes . Animals generally forage based on flavor profiles and nutrient content, especially when consuming different components of available plant anatomy . The spatial distribution of plant populations, plant species richness, and spatial relationships among different plant species in natural grasslands affect livestock foraging behaviors. Specifically, sheep increased consumption of high-preference species when low-preference species followed a clumped distribution rather than a random distribution . High plant species richness enhanced the frequency that animals switched diets and weakened the ability of herbivores to choose food, increasing foraging costs and interfering with the herbivore’s choice of foraging . Herbivores consumed the largest number of palatable plants when 3 plants species were segregated into 3 patches independent of each other. In contrast, the total forage intake of herbivores for all plant species was reduced when the 3 species were homogenously distributed through patches in a spatially equal neighbor relationship .

Local environments can influence dietary selections by grazing livestock. Extensive studies with pen-fed ruminants have shown that the ambient temperature affects feeding willingness ; however, very little empirical data is available describing the mechanisms affecting herbage intake in grazing ruminants under variable temperature management. Nonetheless, the physiological consequences of heat or cold stress may be similar for ruminants under housing or grazing. In beef cattle, feed intake increased at temperatures from  15 to 28  C but decreased at temperatures above 28  C . For grazing ruminants, behavioral responses amplified the effects of temperature stress on herbage intake under heat and cold stress . Studies examining the relationship between temperature stress and foraging willingness have primarily exhibited inconsistent results. Adams et al. observed significant reductions in the herbage intake of grazing cattle under acute cold stress, whereas Beverlin et al. found only minor changes in herbage intake for cows experiencing changing temperatures . Due to the inconsistent results, whether or not temperature stress affects forage intake in grazing ruminants remains ambiguous. The most relevant measurements to date are also relatively short-term, making it difficult to make recommendations on adjusting intake predictions. The effects of ambient temperature on forage intake may also be amplified by other environmental factors, like wind or precipitation conditions. For instance, wind velocity exacerbated the effects of low temperatures on grazing ruminants during winter but could help alleviate heat stress in summer . Previous studies also reported that rainfall events temporarily reduced the intake of grazing cattle by 10% to 30%, decreasing the cattle’s average daily gain . In addition, terrain plays a principal role in the forage selection of grazing livestock . When examining geographic and environmental factors affecting livestock feeding behaviors, cattle tended to avoid foraging on pastures with slopes greater than 10% inclines during grazing trials, and the number of grazing animals decreased as the slope increased. On slopes with a greater than 60% incline, almost no animals were found foraging . The location of water sources and social behaviors also affected foraging selection by grazing livestock .In addition to variable environmental factors, grazing regimes established by managers are also vital components of estimating forage intake in grazing animals.

Kitessa and Nicol found that cattle continuously co-grazed with sheep showed a lower herbage intake than those rotationally co-grazed with sheep. Perez-Ramirez et al. demonstrated that decreased grazing time of dairy cows strongly increased the pasture intake rate and decreased the foraging selectivity relative to available herbage. Congruently, dairy cows were more motivated to forage when receiving a low-supplement feeding regime. Furthermore, Savian et al. found that the sheep undergoing rotatinuous stocking exhibited an increase in daily herbage intake and improved bite rates compared to those under traditional rational stocking management, suggesting that rotatinuous stocking maximized the herbage intake and optimized the grazing time of sheep. Nevertheless, the factors influencing livestock dietary selections are also constantly changing ,bato bucket as grazing animals are foraging in a dynamic world. Herbage production, grassland community composition, and plant chemical composition fluctuate considerably in response to changing environmental and climatic conditions . This perspective has been supported by a longitudinal study of arid rangelands . Over the 37-year study period, herbage production varied annually between 4% and 307% of the median value. Simultaneously, temporalespatial variations in the herbage’s chemical composition, richness, evenness, and biomass led to heterogeneity. As a result of grazing, preferred plants and specific parts of the plant’s anatomy are removed from the landscape over time, leading to continuous changes in the plant community composition within pasture environments . The complex influencing factors, combined with continuously changing grassland herbage resources , make foraging selections of grazing ruminants extraordinarily complex and unpredictable.In the future, continued research is necessary to clarify and explore the mechanisms underlying foraging behavior, thereby helping us better predict grazing ruminants’ diet selection. Farmers, landowners, and livestock managers have an obligation to embrace vital agricultural and technological advances and establish new nutritional assessment methods for grazing ruminants. Implementation of nutritional intake assessments based on foraging selection behaviors assessment will allow stabilization and increased production in livestock agribusiness. Consequently, our knowledge regarding the nutritional requirements of grazing ruminants requires greater refinement. Many additional elements have been identified to affect the nutritional requirements of grazed ruminants , so knowledge gleaned from animals kept indoors cannot be extrapolated to ruminants in outdoor pasture environments. Further data collection and longitudinal studies are necessary to build mechanistic models of the nutritional requirements of grazing ruminants in terms of energy, protein, minerals, vitamins, and water. Continued research should focus on the critical factors controlling grassland ecological and productive functions.

Biodiversity has been identified as the primary determinant of grassland ecosystem services and functions . Experimental studies have shown that the stability and functionality of grassland ecosystems require high plant species diversity and multi-trophic species diversity for co-regulation like that of below ground soil microbial diversity and above ground community diversity . Improving grassland biodiversity by systematically managing grazing practices is critical for grassland ecological service advancement. Therefore, future studies should target identifying mechanisms of grassland biodiversity maintenance and grazing regulations on grassland biodiversity, offering a scientifically reproducible basis for guiding grazing manipulation practices . It has long been recognized within livestock production practices that rumen microbial communities play an essential role in improving ruminant production and health. The rumen microbiome, consisting of bacteria, protozoa, fungi, archaea, and viruses, composes a sophisticated symbiotic network essential to the maintenance, immune function, and overall production efficiency of the host ruminants . Digestion performed by the rumen microbial community accounts for up to 70% of the total dietary energy in ruminants. The symbiotic metabolic operation between a ruminant host and the rumen microbiome results in many end products critical to other biological processes, including developing the rumen epithelium and establishing the immune system . Ergo, improving our understanding of rumen microbial ecology in grazing ruminants promotes enhanced animal production efficiencies. Considering nutritional manipulation for grazing livestock should also be a management option to optimize rumen microbial communities. Ultimately, this in-depth examination of livestock grazing management and nutritional practices aims to provide a blueprint for developing sustainable, grassland-based ruminant farming systems by integrating animal behavior analysis, animal nutrition principles, and grassland ecology, to achieve “winewin” outcomes for grassland ecological/ecosystem functions and livestock production policies .

We used the t-distribution with to calculate the 95% CI for the overall mean effects . We used the Restricted Maximum-Likelihood method for estimating all model parameters because it is more efficient and presents less bias when calculating heterogeneity . For abundance and species richness data, we examined the suitability of conducting the three-level meta-analysis compared to the two level model using one-sided log-likelihood-ratio tests for the variance at the second and third levels separately.In addition to the heterogeneity parameters tested by the model, we quantified the proportion of the observed variance for each of the three levels , I2 , I2 using the formulas provided in Cheung . The application of moderator analyses is justified when the I2is low compared to the total variance . We applied univariate meta-regression procedures to examine whether the functional groups , and landscape composition , heterogeneity , and configuration metrics moderated the effect of farming systems on biodiversity. Landscape configuration , was categorised for capturing differences at smaller and larger ranges beyond the 1 km threshold. An omnibus test based on the F-distribution was used to evaluate whether there were significant differences in effect sizes across the values of each moderator . We also examined if the influence of each landscape metric on the estimated effect size were the same across the six functional groups, by including the interaction between functional groups and each landscape metric as a moderator in the meta-regression models. To facilitate the interpretation of the results, we reported the mean effect sizes and their CI as percentages changes by back-transforming the log response ratios and converting them to percentages − 1.

A mean effect size > 0 indicates biodiversity was positively impacted by diversified farming, whereas a mean effect size < 0 indicates biodiversity was negatively impacted by diversified farming. A mean effect size equal to zero indicates little or no difference between diversified and simplified systems. We applied multivariate models to check which variables continued significantly moderating the overall effect when controlling for other variables hydroponic grow table. The inclusion of highly collinear moderators in the same model, however, may lead to problems of overfitting or spurious results . We tested for multicollinearity between moderators by computing the Cramer’s V correlation between categorical variables, Spearman correlation between continuous variables, and Kruskal-Wallis H test between categorical and continuous variables. We considered moderators as presenting severe collinearity between each other when Cramer’s V or Spearman correlation were ≥ 0.7 or Kruskal-Wallis H tests were significant . We constructed separated multivariate models for abundance and species richness by adding all non-collinear moderators found to be significant predictors during the univariate models. We ignored collinearity between functional groups and the landscape metrics, since they are conceptually very different . We used omnibus tests to compare the significance of each moderator that had been found to be significant in the univariate models. Finally, we used multi-model inference to check the model fit statistics of each applied model based on the corrected Akaike’s Information Criterion . We used the AICc as our selection method because it is considered to be less biased and selects models that are much closer to the truth . We found significant interaction effects between functional groups abundance and the landscape metrics . The positive impact of diversified farming systems on decomposers abundance increased with the increment of the percentage of natural habitats, land cover diversity, and when plots were near and very far away from natural habitats . The impact of diversified farming systems on natural enemies’ abundance were significantly positive in farming plots located near and moderately near to natural habitats.

Contrastingly, the abundance of pests was significantly reduced in diversified farming systems located very close or moderately near to natural habitats, and in landscape with high land cover diversity. The abundance of pollinators was significantly higher in diversified farming systems located moderately far and very far away from natural habitats, and in agricultural landscape with high land cover diversity. The omnibus tests from the multivariate models applied for abundance showed that functional groups and the interaction between Functional groups and Euclidean min-distance to natural or semi-natural habitats remained significant moderators . However, the interaction effects between Functional groups and Percentage of natural habitat, and Functional groups and Land cover Shannon’s diversity index were no longer significant when including Functional groups in the models.This meta-analysis showed that, on average, diversified farming systems improves the richness and abundance of non-domesticated taxa with potential benefits for local and global biodiversity and food production goals. The magnitude of the overall effect varies with functional group and landscape complexity, heterogeneity and composition. Similar to Lichtenberg et al. , our study showed that agricultural diversification substantially increased species richness, and had a non-significant positive effect on abundance. This may reflect that farming diversification helps support a wider range of species, probably as more diverse habitat and resources open up . However, diversification may limit simultaneously individual species dominance reducing the population numbers for some species . For example, our results show that while the abundance of beneficial functional groups tended to have positive effect sizes, pest populations significantly decreased in diversified systems and therefore reduced the overall mean effect size for abundance. The variable effects of diversified farming systems across functional groups supports the notion that different species respond to biotic interactions and abiotic conditions according to their functional traits . The negative effect of diversified farming systems on pest abundance may be related to higher predation and parasitism rates in diversified farming systems , due to synergistic effects between species . Indeed we found a higher richness of natural enemies in diversified systems, consistent with several previous meta-analyses . Our study extends on previous work by including pest plants and our findings suggest the pest control benefits of diversified farming systems extend to weed suppression.

Crop and farm diversification may be an effective weed management strategy helping to reduce the need for herbicide inputs . Our synthesis demonstrated pollinator richness and abundance benefited from diversified farming practices, consistent with previous quantitative syntheses . The positive effect of diversified farming systems on the concentration of pollinator species might lead to a greater provision of pollination services with benefits to crop yields . Ensuring pollinator abundance may be more important than richness for provision of pollination services since pollination in agroecosystems might be mostly delivered by a few abundant and widespread species of insects rather than rare pollinator species . Nevertheless, a high redundancy of pollinators can help ensure community stability and function provision against unexpected changes . Agroecosystem resilience is associated with high diversity of organisms responsible for maintaining soil structure and nutrients cycling . Conversely to previous studies that indicated local management had little effect on decomposers , our results – including a wider range of taxa – demonstrated that diversified farming systems substantially increased decomposer abundance. This may be because diversified farming systems have a higher concentration of soil organic matter, benefiting soil biota . Effects on decomposers may also be associated with changes in autotrophs identified in this study, since a higher richness of autotrophs can supply more diverse resources which may enhance the decomposer community . Simpler landscape configurations enhanced the positive effect of diversified farming systems on the overall biodiversity richness in our study, specifically when natural habitats were > 1000 m away or constituted ≈ < 60% of the surrounding 1 km radii area. Our results agree with the “intermediate landscape complexity hypothesis”, which stablish the positive effect of local-conservation practices might be higher in agricultural plots located in simple landscapes than in complex ones . This response may be because in landscapes with a lower proportion of natural habitats, diversified farming systems may offer more varied habitats and resources attracting a higher variety of organisms than monocultures . Hence, diversification strategies at the farm level should complement restoration approaches at the landscape scale  for promoting biodiversity, and softening productivity-ecosystem services trade-offs . Similar to prior observations , we found some interaction effects between functional groups diversity and the surrounding landscape characteristics. Our synthesis showed the importance of farming diversification at increasing pollinators abundance and richness in highly simplified and heterogeneous landscapes. Farm-scale diversification strategies might counter the direct negative impact of the absence of surrounding natural or semi-natural habitats on pollinators number and diversity, and therefore,flood tray enhance pollination service provision .

Natural and semi-natural habitats close to farming plots might be important to sustain populations of predators which benefit from the resources offered by natural habitats as well as by adjacent crops . This may also explain the reduction in pest abundance in diversified farms close to natural and semi-natural habitats, where predators were more abundant helping limit infestations . Moreover, our results showed the positive effects of diversified farming systems on decomposer abundance tend to increase with landscape complexity, primarily the proportion of surrounding natural habitats and landscape heterogeneity, but also with the distance from natural and semi-natural habitats. These results suggest the colonisation of soil biota may depend on the surrounding landscape and organisms’ dispersal abilities . However, decomposer richness seems to be independent of landscape patterns , and more influenced by local characteristics such as soil type, climate, plant diversity, and temperature . On the other hand, autotrophs responded positively to farming system diversification as landscape complexity increased, which may reflect that higher landscape complexity facilitates seed pool dispersal and establishment . Besides, most of the autotrophs’ data came from the comparison effect of simplified and agroforestry systems, suggesting the establishment and development of non-crop plants also could be promoted by the lower herbicide input or soil disturbance practices that characterised these diversified systems . Results from the multivariate models revealed the robustness of the unique moderating effect of functional groups, and the interaction between landscape configuration and functional groups, on abundance. However, the interaction between landscape composition and heterogeneity with functional groups were no longer significant when accounting for other variables in the same model. These results may be because landscape composition and heterogeneity interact with functional groups in determining effect sizes, but functional group has a stronger effect on its own. For species richness, none of the non-collinear predictors with significant moderating effects within the univariate models remained significant when included together in the same model. The reduction in the significance of these variables may be related to the lower number of effect sizes in the species richness database , which leads to small class sizes when multiple variables are combined in a single model. When the sample size is small, multivariate models may be statistically less powerful than univariate models . While our results show that functional group, and distance to and proportion of natural and semi-natural habitat, moderate the effect of diversified farming on species richness, future research to expand the number of effect sizes in the richness database as new studies emerge would be valuable to confirm which moderators have the strongest influence. The sensitivity and publication bias analysis, in addition to the prepublication of the review protocol and the meta-data , guarantee the transparency and reproducibility of our meta-analysis . While sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of our overall findings for abundance, we identified some changes in the significance of the species richness results when excluding the effect size outliers and with a high risk of bias from the analyses. The exclusion of one highly influential effect size reduced the significance of the overall farming systems impact on species richness by widening its confidence interval. However, the significance of the overall species richness results was not affected by the exclusion of 175 effect sizes with a high risk of bias. Hence, this last finding may ensure the robustness of our overall results for species richness. On the other hand, the reduction in significance of positive effect of diversified systems on pollinators species richness may be related to the exclusion of almost 40% of the effect sizes. Moreover, we identified possible sources of publication bias that may reduce the generalisation of our conclusions.

Today, unlike the original gantry systems where one set of uncropped pathways received the same amount of traffic, a CTF managed field may have different pathways, some cropped and some uncropped, receiving different levels of traffic depending on the implement working widths, but all in multiples of the narrowest machine working width. CTF can also be viewed and implemented differently in different regions and/or across different farming groups with ‘seasonal CTF’ for example deploying a CTF system after primary cultivation until the end of that season or until the harvesting operation. The essence of CTF is to eliminate soil compaction within the cropped area, improve tractive efficiency on the permanent tracks, and thereby improve crop yield and economic return. Setting a CTF system on a farm is often made over years during which the machines being replaced are chosen, or they are modified, to match the CTF system chosen. Mainly a base working width has to be chosen . Fertilization and crop protection is often made at widths of 2, 3 or 4 times the primary working width. While CTF originally in Australia aimed to have the track width of all equipment the same, today in Europe it is often accepted that this is expensive, inconvenient and not suitable for road transport. Consequently a wider track width for combines is accepted. Besides, wider tyres are deployed to reduce the impact of traffic as all other traffic paths are cropped . Researchers have attempted to assess the economic and environmental benefits of CTF using field experiments. From a case study for a multi-cut grass silage system in Scotland, UK, Hargreaves et al. documented that introducing CTF provides a net economic return derived from increased yields due to a reduction in compaction and sward damage.

Antille et al. provided a review of the effects/implications of CTF systems on overall soil health, crop performance and yield,mobile vertical farm fertilizer and water use efficiency, and greenhouse gas emissions. As early as 1986, energy savings of approximately 50% were reported from CTF use in the Netherlands . In Denmark, Gasso et al. presented the significant potential for CTF to reduce environmental impacts through reduced greenhouse gas emissions in intensively managed arable cropping systems with at least 20% reduction in direct emissions from field operations. Based on a 10 year field experiment from Loess Plateau in China, Bai et al. indicated that CTF increased mean wheat yield by 11.2%. Drawing from a case study on an Australian sugar cane farm, Halpin et al. concluded that a farming system with precision CTF and minimum tillage is more profitable than traditional practice. Using whole farm modelling in Australian dryland agriculture, Kingwell, Fuchsbichler reported that CTF would increase profit by 50% mainly through its beneficial effect on yield and crop quality. Hussein et al. reported 30% increase in sorghum yield due to CTF. Studies from Denmark and the UK showed that CTF enables a considerable reduction in headland area and input use and claimed that the overall benefits would be higher if CTF was integrated with other precision farming techniques . CTF also provides other benefits such as minimizing soil runoff, economizing on input use from reduced overlaps, providing reduced operator stress with auto-steering and reducing soil-emissions . Tullberg documented that by restricting compaction to narrow and permanent wheel tracks, CTF contributes to reducing nitrous oxide emissions which are higher in compacted soils. Tullberg et al. concluded that CTF can bring about 30–50% reduction in soil nitrous oxide and methane emissions. The benefits can potentially be higher when CTF is combined with reduced tillage or no-tillage systems and assisted by precision agriculture technologies . While CTF is considered to provide multifaceted benefits as summarized above, there are also potential drawbacks associated with it. The main drawback is the investment required in suitable width matched machinery and the associated auto-steering technology. Driving patterns must be controlled, which can have implications for field efficiency in service vehicles like grain trailers or slurry tankers which must follow the pathways rather than turning to exit the field by the shortest distance when their load cycle is complete .

CTF is compatible with EU soil protection laws and regulations aimed at preventing soil compaction. While soil is compacted in the permanent track area 70–80% of the farm area is not compacted by field traffic where CTF is deployed . Low soil disturbance minimum tillage or no-till is more easily deployed with CTF as the soil is not subjected to traffic induced compaction. While the permanent tracks will be compacted, negative effects are limited to a small area and are more than compensated for by the lack of random traffic and intensive soil cultivation in the larger field area . While experimental evidence suggests multiple benefits from CTF, its use on commercial farms is limited for various reasons such as the high cost of machinery modification ; the perception that CTF is not for small farms ; and the lack of demonstrated benefits under local conditions. Moreover, CTF demands a change of mindset towards prioritizing soil health, careful route planning and making decisions with a long-term perspective and in a holistic manner. In Europe, soil compaction is already recognized as a threat . However, CTF remains a niche activity. In the literature, the benefits of CTF in terms of yield improvement, soil health, input-use efficiency and environmental benefits are frequently reported. However, literature on the perceptions/views, knowledge and concerns relating to CTF and its adoption, of current, and of potential, CTF using farmers, is lacking. This study intends to fill part of this gap by analyzing data from a survey of farmers, as part of adoption studies in two ICT-AGRI European projects: CTF-OptiMove and PAMCoBA . The primary objective is to assess and understand farmers’ perceptions about CTF and related technologies; what limits them from using the technology and how they think it could be improved. The study also seeks to identify intervention approaches, relevant stakeholders, and their roles for the future development of CTF. The data used in this study is from a cross sectional survey collected from January to April 2018 from 8 European countries using the network of the project participants to secure participants.The survey was a structured questionnaire administered online using the SurveyXact platform . An overview of the survey data is provided in Thomsen et al. . All 263 members of the CTF Europe association which includes farmers, advisors, machinery companies and others with an interest in CTF farming systems, were invited to participate.

CTF Europe member farmers generally operate larger farm sizes than average in their countries. In the Netherlands, the survey was distributed to 63 farmers, 3 were from the list in CTF Europe and the rest were members of a farmers’ association in the Hoeksche Waard district who cooperated in earlier projects on in-field traffic. Compared to other regions in the Netherlands, HW member farmers are considered more advanced and early adopters. In Belgium, the survey was distributed to approximately 2200 farmers using the sprayer inspection customer database for Flanders, administered by the Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food . In Ireland, the survey was distributed to 140 farmers with active email addresses from the total membership of 200 of the Irish Tillage and Land Use Society . ILTUS members tend to be the larger growers in the country with between 100 and 800 ha per farm. A total of 103 valid survey responses were received and used in this study. The survey data included demographic attributes of the respondents , farm size, machinery ownership, tillage type, concern about soil damage due to heavy machinery and remedial measures, mode of farm ownership, perception/expectation about longterm benefits from using Precision Farming & GNSS and, use of CTF practices. Survey participants who considered themselves as ‘CTF-users’ were asked technical, experience and expectation related questions relating to their use of CTF. The survey questionnaire contained an introduction section giving background information about soil compaction and CTF. The conceptual definition of CTF provided in the introduction section was: “Controlled Traffic Farmingis a production and management system that requires the repeated use of the same wheel track for every operation, and for all vehicles and implements to have a particular span corresponding to the base wheel track”. In this study, ’CTF user’ denotes farmers’ own perception of their CTF use as responded to the question “Do you use CTF” . Two issues must be considered when analyzing the survey data. Firstly, the low response rate may introduce a selection bias, i.e., those farmers with prior experience with CTF technology and early adopters of mechanization technologies may have participated at a higher rate than those operating small farms and/or not considering CTF. Secondly, there is heterogeneity in sampling across countries in the survey. Members of CTF Europe already have awareness of and are interested in CTF.

The respondents from Ireland were members of a soil and tillage association that had participated in previous workshop events concerning soil compaction prevention, though not specifically CTF. However, the sample from Belgium is quite different because the criterion was owning a sprayer and only included the Flanders region with relatively small farm sizes. The study used a descriptive approach to present farmers’ perceptions, experiences, expectations, challenges and needs regarding CTF. Numerical data was summarized using percentages, cross-tabulations, vertical farming racks and histograms. Responses to open-ended questions were summarized and explained under thematic headings. Where it was considered useful, data was disaggregated by country and/or CTFuse category. Owing to the small sample size and sampling heterogeneity across the countries surveyed, the use of statistical analysis methods was limited. To assess the presence of statistically significant differences in mean farm size between CTF-user and non-user groups, a T-test was performed. 3. Results 3.1. Sample distribution, farm size and production type by country The distribution of survey respondents, farm size and production type is presented by country in Table 1. Most of the respondents were from Belgium, Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. In terms of proportion of CTF-users, the UK sample ranks first followed by Ireland and Belgium . Because of their very small representation, samples from Germany, France, Canada and Sweden are grouped together as ’Others’. In Table 1 summary statistics for total farm size and the percentage of farm area where CTF is applied is presented . There is a wide difference in farm size across countries. Categorizing farm area into large , medium and small shows that nearly 86% of respondents from Belgium operate small farms in contrast to none for the UK sample. The majority of the respondents from Ireland and the Netherlands lie in the medium farm size category. Farm sizes are larger for the Danish and UK sample with 75% and 65% respectively greater than 500 ha. The percentage of farm area under CTF operations also differs across countries. The sample from Belgium is the lowest both in terms of farm size and the proportion under CTF practice. The UK sample features the highest values both in farm size and percentage area under CTF and this data is also from 14 CTF user farms, which is a much larger sample than from the other countries. As shown in Table 2, there appears to be considerable difference in the type of crop/animal production respondents are involved in . For the aggregate sample, 82% of respondents said to produce one or more cereal crops, 40% onion, 37% perennial crops and 31% beet with the least proportion involved in pig production. Note that a respondent could engage in more than one type of crop and/ or animal production. Cereal production is the most common for the sampled farmers with the vast majority reported to have produced one or more cereal crops . In UK and Ireland, all sampled farmers produce cereal crops. Pig production is the least common with only 50%, 16% and 6% of the samples from Denmark, Belgium and UK respectively involved in it.

The respondents were asked to select the two most important reasons for the conversion from a predefined list of 13 options ; one option also enabled an open response. The reasons listed in the question were obtained from previous studies and surveys. The marketing channels question addressed how their organic produce sales were divided into seven categories of channels : direct marketing, sales to primary production, sales to the processing sector, sales to the retail and wholesale trade, sales to private kitchens, sales to the public sector, and other channels. In addition, they were asked to provide their sales distribution divided as shares in their own region , the rest of Finland, and abroad. The results of the survey highlighted economic and environmental factors as significant drivers for converting from conventional to organic farming. The most important reason given by the farmers was smaller production costs leading to better viability, with 36% selecting this as their first option. The second most popular reason was ecology or sustainability, with 19% of farmers selecting this as their primary motivation. These two options were highlighted as significant in every region. Other reasons that were also frequently mentioned were healthiness and cleanness, a better price for their produce, subsidies, and the farm’s production already approximating organic farming practices. In addition, the survey revealed a wide variety of other reasons, from principles and ideology to specialisation and an interest in organic production. As anticipated, the results varied between the regions. One significant difference related to the importance of subsidies in the decision to convert from conventional to organic farming . Over 40% of the organic farmers in Kainuu stated that subsidies were among the two most important reasons for their farm conversion. In contrast, none of farmers from Satakunta selected this as an important option. It is interesting to note that Kainuu had the highest organic share and Satakunta had the lowest organic share. Indeed,roll bench the four regions where subsidies were given the highest importance were among the regions with the highest organic shares.

The development or availability of markets for organic products is also an important factor affecting farmers’ conversion decisions . The use of a broad range of marketing channels in a particular region indicates diverse demand and better sales opportunities. The results of the survey showed considerable variation in the utilised marketing channels . One of the regions used all seven categories, and in most of the regions, farmers sold their products to five or six of the marketing channels. The share of sales to the processing industry varied between 20% and 57%; primary production sales were between 25% and 57%; and direct sales varied between 0% and 20%. The proportion of sales to the retail and wholesale trade was the highest in Southwest Finland and the lowest in North Ostrobothnia.Other smaller markets included, for example, sales to abattoirs and sales through food collectives. According to the survey, the majority of the sales took place within the producer’s own region, 66% on average. In order to reveal regional differences in market concentration, the market concentration index was calculated for all the regions. A higher share was associated with more concentrated organic farmers’ markets in a region. The results also revealed that the least concentrated markets were located in some southern regions, such as Southwest Finland, H¨ ame, and Uusimaa . In contrast, the highest concentrations were found in Western Finland . For most of the conditions , we used the national average level to establish the position of demarcation between 0.33 and 0.67. This was a natural cut-off point to highlight cases below and above the average, as the studied cases covered all the mainland Finnish regions. The values 0.33 and 0.67 concern equal value ranges from the average national level. These value ranges were formed statistically: values of 0.67–1 and 0–0.33 were divided so that averages above or below 0.5 served as devisors. A value of 1 indicates that it is closest to the theory explaining the regional differences in organic farming. Fuzzy-set scores were set to the outcome and to all of the selected conditions in every case . The data indicated that a total of three regions have a clearly high organic share , while four are slightly above the average , four are slightly below the average , and the remaining four are clearly below the average .

The necessity analysis revealed that none of these conditions are necessary for a high organic share of total cultivated land when using a score of 0.90 as a consistency threshold for a necessary condition, a method similar to Marks et al. . Overall, the necessity analysis scores for consistency varied from 0.55 to 0.80 , with the highest scores associated with sectors as well as subsidies and the smallest markets. Our conceptual approach implies that different factors impact different regions; therefore, even the lowest score conditions were included in the sufficiency analysis. Table 5 presents the pathway results of the sufficiency analysis. The results showed three different pathways and covered five of the seven regions with a high organic share. None of the conditions are present in every pathway leading to a high organic share, which confirms that none of the conditions are necessary for a high organic share. The most common pathway to a high proportion of organic farming includes a long organic heritage, a concentration on dairy farming, and a region that places a high importance on subsidies. Pathway 1 represents the three highest organic shares in Finland . Pathway 2 differs from the first pathway in only one factor. Instead of a long heritage, it includes a larger farm size. Pathway 2 covers two regions, North Ostrobothnia and North Karelia. Pathway 3 is represented by one region . In pathway 3, a long organic heritage and larger farms and markets enable the high organic share. These pathways do not apply to two Finnish regions with higher organic shares, Pirkanmaa and Southeast Finland. In our results, consistency scores for all pathways are over the recommended 0.8. In two of the pathways, the consistency score is 1.00. The coverage scores are highest in pathways 1 and 2 . In the third pathway, the coverage score is 0.15. The solution score of 0.89 for solution consistency is over the threshold score of 0.75. Thus, the results can be considered sufficient to establish a set-theoretical relation. The solution score for coverage is 0.80, indicating that the three pathways apply to 80% of Finnish regions with an above-average organic share. The analyses for the low share organic farming regions confirmed the logic of the results for regions with a high organic share. One of the most common pathways to a low organic share was the mirror image of pathway 1: a lack of an organic heritage, a concentration on cereals production, and a low value placed on subsidies.

Overall, the analysis for the low organic regions revealed three different pathways with a solution coverage of 0.88 and a solution consistency of 0.88. These solutions cover all low organic regions as well as some high organic share regions. Thus, the absence of the selected conditions clearly reveals why some regions have a low proportion of organic land. This study reveals new knowledge about the regional differences in the share of organic cultivated land in mainland Finland. This kind of knowledge is needed to achieve the targets to increase organic farming and further promote rural development and a sustainability transition . In addition, our results are similar to those of Cairns et al. , as we show that QCA can be a valuable method for theory-testing regional studies that focus on complex entities. Our findings confirm the assertion of Ilbery et al. that the regional concentration of organic farming is explained by a combination of different factors rather than a single factor. However, our results suggest that the categorisation by Ilbery et al. should be supplemented with clear economic factors, such as the importance of subsidies, to improve coverage of the possible causes of regional concentrations in organic farming. The importance of subsidies has been highlighted in earlier studies ; however, previous research focused on farmers’ general decision-making rather than addressing the connection with regional differences. The location of farms in different Finnish regions affects their economic opportunities, and therefore the role of economic aid can vary. Our findings highlight the importance of economic aspects and align with the results of Lehtim¨ aki and Virtanen on the economisation of organic agriculture in Finland, at least to some extent. A close review of the data reveals that different types of regions utilise different pathways to achieve a high share of organic cultivated land. There are significant regional differences in cultivation conditions in Finland; therefore it is logical that the key factors involved in a high organic land share vary. Pathway 1 applies to the regions in Eastern Finland with the three highest shares of organic farming . This pathway confirms the results of Pietola and Lansik concerning low yields and subsidies, although the authors did not consider relevant educational or development programmes in the earlier decades of organic farming. Our findings suggest that a long organic heritage is one of the key factors affecting regional concentrations of organic farming, commercial greenhouse supplies a result also noted by Ilbery et al. . In comparison to other regions, a long regional organic heritage can represent an early social acceptance and learning from regional organic education actors or neighbours.

As L¨ ahdesm¨ aki et al. concluded, social acceptance is a key factor in achieving sustainability goals. In addition, increased knowledge helps to make the decision about the conversion . The absence of markets in this path may be due to the focus on dairy farming in these regions; dairy farming markets are often national rather than regional and rather concentrated. Although markets can still be important in these regions, they are not particularly versatile and may not be located locally. Overall, pathway 1 covers all the subsystems described in the food system conceptualization by Helenius et al. : socioeconomic subsystems , people as actors/decision-makers , and biophysical subsystems . Despite initially relating to the food system more generally, these three subsystems or categories seem to offer an apt categorisation of the different factors that are connected to the variation in regional organic farming. Pathway 2 describes the relevant factors in Northern Finland and also in one eastern Finnish region . The fact that both the first and second pathways apply to North Karelia reinforces its position as the region with the highest share of organic farming in Finland. In turn, pathway 3 illustrates the situation in Southern Finland , where markets seem to play an important, albeit not singular, role in the development of a high organic share. Our finding that markets are a significant factor aligns with the conclusions of several previous studies . The present study confirms several previous findings regarding the conditions in the regions with a high proportion of organic land. For example, as in other countries , lower agro-ecological conditions seem to play an important role in characterising the regions with the highest organic shares in Finland. However, agro-ecological conditions alone are insufficient to explain the high shares in these regions; instead, it appears to be the result of a combination of several conditions, as noted by Ilbery et al. . In addition, while markets seem to be important, market diversity and close proximity seem to be more relevant in regions that focus on cereals production. Moreover, the absence of these conditions seems to illustrate why some regions have a low share of organic land. Even though the unique characteristics of different countries and regions suggest that the pathways for Finland are not necessarily universally applicable, it is likely that similar factors and especially a combination of several conditions also affect regional differences and the share of organic land in areas outside Finland, particularly in middle-income and high-income countries.

Arid and semi-arid climatic conditions, low precipitation, poor soils, and overly intensive land use all pose the Land Use/Land Cover Change frequently change in the farming-pastoral ecotone of northern China and leading the complex landscape structure in this area . The farming-pastoral ecotone of north China is a transitional zone of China’s two biological communities: traditional pastoral and agricultural areas and is a valuable environmental security barrier zone , while Inner Mongolia is the central part of it. Due to its important ecological function, the LUCC in Inner Mongolia has received much attention for a long time, especially the land use types with valuable ecological service function like natural grassland, woodland and retired cropland which formulated by the “Grain for Green” program . GGP is by far the largest ecological restoration scheme and rural development program globally . GGP recommended the cropland has lower average grain yields to adopt artificial woodland, shrubbery since launched in Inner Mongolia in 2000 . GGP has accelerated the changes in land use in the ecological transition zone in the past 20 years, especially the changes in cropland use , and many studies have shown the strong ties between LUCC and GGP in Inner Mongolia since it has been in place to reduce deforestation, promote forest gain, and relieve human pressure on land through converting cropland to artificial planting with higher ecological service function.GGP has converted the cropland into artificial forest or woodland in southern China. At the same time, in the farming-pastoral ecotone in the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains, due to the harsh ecological environment, shrub plants that are resistant to drought, cold and barrenness, were planted during the last two decades and have been shown a shrubland belt with distinctive characteristics . In addition, the complexity of cropland in the farming-pastoral ecotone in the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains is not only reflected in the cropland-retired cropland conversation, but also there is a large amount of fallow and abandoned field in the preponement cropland, low round pots which can cause a range of social, economic, and environmental issues .

It has been 20 years since GGP started to be implemented in the northern farming-pastoral ecotone. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the effect of such ecological restoration project in ecologically fragile areas and the resulting land use changes. Using remote sensing data to map the cropland use change accurately is fundamental for evaluating ecosystem functions/services, policy formulation and implementation of agriculture in the ecological transition zone . Satellite remote sensing data have become an essential source of information for quantifying and better understanding environmental change, particularly monitoring vegetation dynamics from regional to global scale . Some studies have analyzed the vegetation dynamics changes in Inner Mongolia using long time series remote sensing data. For example, Hu and Nacun identified land use patterns and land cover change in Inner Mongolia from 1990 to 2015 using long-term remote sensing data. The result showed that the land use changes dramatically in Inner Mongolia and woodland increased the most. Also, they pointed out that most of the increased cropland was converted from grassland before 2000; the increased grassland area and improved vegetation coverage were the main land use process from 2000 to 2015. Li et al. used MODIS and Landsat dataset to map the land cover in Inner Mongolia in 2000 and 2014; according to their research, 35.3% of cropland converted to grassland, which the ecological restoration program could cause. Liu et al. found that grassland to cropland conversion and cropland retired as woodland or grassland co-occurred in the central farming-pastoral part of Inner Mongolia, while the grassland area generally decreased during 2000 to 2005. The conversion between cropland, grassland and cropland retirement in Inner Mongolia is highlighted in these studies. Other studies have treated the retired cropland as a separate land use type, and monitored and analyzed the temporal and spatial evolution of the retired cropland in Inner Mongolia. For example, Yin et al. used medium-resolution MODIS data to monitor the temporal and spatial changes of forest loss, forest gain and cropland retirement in Inner Mongolia from 2001 to 2014 when during the ecology restoration program implementation period. The results of this study showed that Inner Mongolia exhibited 1.32% of cropland-to-grassland conversions; besides, they pointed out that 0.29% of cropland has been converted to forest. However, the study did not note that the landscape of retired cropland is very different from forest and grassland in the farming-pastoral zone in central Inner Mongolia.

Other existent approaches which reported the retired cropland face insufficient to meet large-scale monitoring needs. The monitoring results of the previous county-scale or cityscale studies about the retired cropland in the farmingpastoral ecotone in the northern foot of Yinshan Mountains were revised by visual interpretation based on the supervision classification to achieve higher accuracy. Although the method mentioned above can interpret the land surface object and achieve good classification accuracy, but it is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It tends to show more prominent artificial interference. Therefore, it does not have the advantage of being promoted in a large area. These studies reported the presence of abandoned and fallow cropland at the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains as well. Moreover, many non-cropped fields, including the fallow and abandonment, can easily misidentify with cropped and retired cropland and surrounding ecosystems using multi-spectral remote sensing images due to their natural regeneration . Hence, due to the complex and changeable cropland using types in the study area, remote sensing monitoring of land use in the farming-pastoral ecotone at the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains has certain difficulties. However, there is a lack of research on monitoring retired cropland in a large area using high resolution remote sensing images. In recent years, remote sensing monitoring methods of land use change have evolved from local to the cloud computing platform and have continuously optimized and improved . Traditional data processing methods based on local software need to go through cumbersome steps such as data collection, data management, data preprocessing, and algorithm operation, which take up many local computing resources. The running time is often in days. In recent years, Google Earth Engine platform, which has gradually attracted attention, is a powerful platform for the analysis and presentation of “Remote Sensing Big Data” . Many classification methods are available for remote sensing image classification and have been ported to GEE. The Random Forest classifier is most widely used in LUCC monitoring because the Random Forest classifier can successfully handle high data dimensionality and multicollinearity with high classification accuracy both fast and insensitive to over-fitting . Therefore, GEE has an irreplaceable advantage in the long-term remote sensing classification of land use in a large area. Our research needs to process the long-term remote sensing data to identify the spatiotemporal change of cropland and the vegetation dynamics on a regional scale. GEE can well meet the needs of this research. We chose the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains, located in the middle of the farming-pastoral ecotone in northern China, as the study area. In this study, we 1. employed a long-time series of Landsat archives and Random Forest classifier on the GEE to identify the cropland and retired cropland accurately for the four time notes; 2. adopted the Land Use Change Trajectory method to indicate the spatiotemporal characteristics of cropland and retired cropland change trajectories; 3. used a long-term vegetation index to reveal the relationship between vegetation dynamics and land use change in the study area and illustrate the GGP’ impact on the vegetation coverage.

The farming-pastoral ecotone in the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains in Inner Mongolia is one of China’s three ecologically fragile zones . This area mainly distributes in northern arid and semi-arid grassland areas with annual precipitation of 300–450 mm and dryness of 1.0–2.0. The ecological environment’s fragility is expressed as arid climate, water resources shortage, loose soil structure, low vegetation coverage, and susceptibility to solid influences from wind erosion, water erosion, and human activities. Important ecosystem types of the farming-pastoral ecotone in the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains include desert grassland, forest, sandy land, cropland, etc. Furthermore, ecological fragility and poverty are the two most prominent problems in this region, and the socio-economic development of this area is seriously affected by land degradation. Moreover, poor ecological conditions and the loss of a large amount of labor are the main reasons for the cropland instability that can cause the disorderly fallow, even cropland abandonment. Therefore, this phenomenon has seriously threatened agricultural production safety and has also become a representative and sensitive area for regional agricultural ecological security research . The farming-pastoral ecotone in the northern foot of the Yinshan Mountains contains 11 counties with a total area of 96,767km2 and spans nearly 730 km from east to west, with an average elevation of 1600 m. It presents a landform pattern dominated by low mountains and hills and wavy plateaus with less precipitation, heavy wind, a short frost-free period, and insufficient heat. Such climatic conditions have a significant impact on local agricultural development. On the other way, grassland pastoral areas mainly distribute in the northern part of the study area. In contrast, arid farming areas are mainly distributed in the southern part of the study area, as shown in Fig. 1.NDVI was calculated based on the normalized difference between the red and near-infrared bands; NDWI was calculated based on the normalized difference between the near infrared and green bands; NDISI was calculated based on the normalized difference between the thermal infrared , red, near-infrared bands and shortwave infrared 2. There is no middle infrared band in both Landsat-5 TM and Landsat-8 OLI images so that we used the shortwave infrared 2 band with the wavelength closest to the middle infrared wavelength to replace the MIR in formula . In this study, the separability of land use classes in the farming-pastoral ecotone in terms of spectral characteristics and index characteristics were discussed.We found that when the cropland contains both active cropland and non-active cropland , the separability among nonactive cropland, retired cropland, plastic pots 30 liters and natural grassland on the spectral bands and indices are weak . After the natural grassland is cultivated, the surface texture characteristics will be significantly changed to be substantially different from the natural grassland.

The retired cropland in the study area is mainly sparse shrubs, which is also different from cropland and natural grassland in texture. Therefore, we assume that texture metrics have the most significant contribution to identifying complex cropland uses. Texture metrics can provide valuable spatial information, reflecting the spatial distribution of the gray levels of remote sensing images and representing the spatial relationship between image features and the surrounding environment . Whether it is on the photograph, aerial photos, or satellite images, the texture is essential for identifying objects or regions of interest. GEE provides the GLCM gray level co-occurrence matrix function to calculate texture metrics. GLCM texture metrics have broad applicability and can be utilized in various image classification applications. Many studies have used texture features for land use classification . In this study, the 14 GLCM indicators proposed by Haralick et al. and 4 other indicators proposed by Conners et al. were used to construct texture metrics set. We modeled band-based texture metrics sets based on the Blue, Green, Red, NIR, SWIR1, SWIR2 of the Landsat5-TM TOA images. On the other hand, we only applied texture information based on the panchromatic band of Landsat-8 OLI TOA images. Comparing with the multi-spectral bands with a 30-meter resolution, the panchromatic band with a 15-meter resolution can provide more detailed texture information. The classification metrics were selected to construct a metrics set to recognize the cropland and the retired cropland in 1990, 2001, 2010, and 2019. The metrics set includes spectral metrics, index metrics, texture metrics, and terrain data . A reducer computes the specified percentiles was quoted to assemble time series data into multi-band image for machine learning classification on the GEE. After that, the texture metrics, elevation, and slope bands were added to the classification imagery.

Argyll and Bute is a county council area, on the West coast of Scotland, but also encompasses thirty three islands, twenty-three of which are inhabited . The physical geography of Argyll is made up of a large number of sea lochs intersecting the coast, resulting in a very long coastline. A large proportion of the population , live within 1km of the coast . Of the 32 Scottish local authorities Argyll and Bute is the second largest geographically, but has the third sparsest population . At the last census, the area had a total population of 88,100, with 25% of this population being over 65 . The area is subject to depopulation, with a population decline of 0.5% between 2018 and 2019. Like Lewis and Harris, the area historically suffered during the clearances , which impacted the traditional ways of life, but also impacted maritime activities such as fishing . Employment in Argyll and Bute is proportionally more reliant upon the physical environment , compared to the general Scottish population . Whilst fisheries were once an important sector, it now supplies less than 1% of employment in Argyll and Bute .The landscape is not only used in an extractive sense, 25 liter pot but is also vital as draw for tourism, where tourism businesses account for 13% of the share of businesses in Argyll, compared with 8% in the whole of Scotland .

The geographical area of Argyll and the Clyde is the largest producer of Atlantic salmon in Scotland and around 80% of Scotland’s pacific oysters, as well as 11% blue mussel production . In addition to the sea-loch and coastal net-pen sites, there are a number of freshwater hatchery sites located within Argyll and Bute. The fish farming industry is estimated to directly support around 460 employees. Like Lewis and Harris, disease episodes and escapes incidents from salmon farm sites have contributed to controversy around the fish farming industry, which have been covered by both local and national press .The process of grounded theory analysis begins as soon as the interviews are conducted . Once the interviews were transcribed, the process of coding began using MS Excel and following the protocol set out by Charmaz and Saldana . An example of which can be seen in Table 3. This technique allowed for codes to be written alongside the interview transcripts keeping them, and subsequent themes, close to the data. It is a suitable technique for working through rich qualitative data, as it assesses every line of interview text, helping the researcher to break it down and encouraging detailed exploration, generating new ideas . Alongside the initial line-by-line coding, memos were created where new ideas were developed from the data. Initial coding was applied across all the interviews first, and consecutively. After this was completed the second and third phases of coding began, where instead within the community, and gender. Participants came from a range of occupations, although there was a focus upon those involved in the marine environment. The following sections describe the themes that have been extracted from the interviews and are set out as subtitles. These themes represent a large portion of those that were extracted from the interviews but not all of them. Themes that were less prominent in the interviews have been excluded in the interests of focus and efficiency. The themes are presented according to the case study sites. However, there were a few themes that were found in both case studies. The two case studies have shown the complexity in experiences of the fish farming industry.

They showed the disjunction between the need both communities had for stable employment, and the perceived risk that fish farming posed to local places, which were highlighted as vital contributions to community identity. It also appears that the perceived identity of the fish farming industry plays into responses to the actions and consequences of fin-fish farming. This research has shown how the identity and place attachment could have consequences for social license to operate for the fish farming industry. The complexity of experiences was shown through the ways in which participants described their concerns around the growth of the fish farming industry and the increasing technological advances, framing these in a largely negative way. Conversely, there were elements of the fish farming industry that participants felt had positive impacts, the most important of which seemed to be the stable employment the industry provides. Reactions to new developments or changes to the environment are often rooted in place based attachment, making each development unique and complex . Further complexities are created through the proximity of communities to developments , as well as perceptions of the industries that are creating change . Therefore, the complexity of perceptions across the two case study sites is not unique. The community values that contributed to the identities of communities on Lewis and Harris and in Argyll and Bute, were perceived as juxtaposing with those that were perceived as important to the fish farming industry. Community values centred around systems which have local benefits, an appreciation of the marine environment and activities that “fit in” with the communities’ identity. The participants often described industry motivations as contrary to theirs. For the most part, these were expressed as the industry working hard to mask or make up for the negative impacts of the industry on local communities. Many interviewees focused on the idea that the industry’s largest motivator was profit. Alongside this the participants recognised the fish farming companies as multinational organisations. Participants had two contrasting perceptions, one of the older structure of the industry and one of the new. Looking at perceptions of the old style of industry, it was often described by participants as being local, emphasising its role in providing local jobs and producing a better product.

These results align with what has been seen in research around the SLO for aquaculture, where it was seen that local ownership allowed for greater integration into the community . The importance placed upon the farms being locally owned, could suggest that they were more associated with community identity and place, than the current system with the majority of production being done by multinational companies . In this sense it is possible to see that perhaps attachments to place and community identity can lead to the othering of the newer fish farming industry model. The transition from these smaller, local farms to the system now in place, where the majority of production is concentrated across five companies can be seen to feed into a sense of distance between the fish farming industries and communities. Multinational companies run the risk of becoming “place-less” as they lack being rooted in one place . Oftentimes companies working at these globalised scales, weaken the ties that they have within local spaces . This was emphasised by participants from Lewis and Harris in particular, as the multinational aspect of the fish farming companies operating in the local area and the rapid growth of sites was seen as the main cause of the problems that industry faces, both in terms of community acceptance and environmental impacts. This echoes what has been found by Baines and Edwards as they highlighted that a loss of social acceptability of aquaculture was in part because of a loss of connection to the industry, which then makes relationship and trust building harder to achieve . The results of this study have shown the influence that identity and place attachment can have upon perceptions of marine developments. Both cases studies provided evidence of communities’ strong attachment to the coastal and marine environment. For some, it was sharing stories of childhoods growing up on the coastlines of Lewis and Harris and for others it was describing the activities that they partake in with the local communities and marine environment. Sense of place plays an integral role in community identity, which can be seen in the way in which interviewees described their relationship with the coastlines in both sites . It is possible that places, and the meanings attributed to them, are so influential that they become one and the same, identity and place becoming intertwined . As Devine-Wright states, opposition to developments can be linked to perceptions that such development threaten identity, because it changes place, and therefore disrupts place attachment . Fin-fish farming activities do create change in landscapes so represent a potential disruption to place attachment . Such changes, and the potential environmental impacts of the fin-fish farming industry, were recognised by participants, suggesting that these risks are noticed by communities.

Therefore, seeing what appears to be a strong place attachment in the two communities of Lewis and Harris, and Argyll and Bute need to be taken into consideration when exploring the SLO for the fish farming industry. This is because what is likely to be acceptable to a community is dependent upon the socio-cultural norms of that community, within which place attachment and its role in identity, raspberry cultivation pot play a part. These socio cultural norms then bound what is acceptable, ultimately impacting SLO. Place attachment makes the social and contextual history of a place consequential for SLO. What is valued in place and attached to identity can be weighed against the risk posed by an activity, such as fin-fish farming. Ultimately affecting what is considered a legitimate and credible . There are further examples of ways in which identity and values can impact SLO. Differences in identity and what is ‘valued’ across the parties involved, have been shown to feed into conflicts . This is especially true where activities pose a risk to spaces valuable to communities . Conflicts can then have clear detrimental impacts upon SLO, especially on trust between those involved . Identity and values also influence response to information on both sides of relationships . Information is shaped by those who share it, with or within communities, as well as shaping industry responses to acceptability challenges . How information is utilised by communities and/or ENGOs has been shown to be influential upon SLO for marine activities . Finally, identity and values can impact trust between groups. The role of identity, especially the alignment of values between the two parties is highlighted as vital . Specifically, for blue economy activities, the role of values has also been recognised as a central component of SLO .The two case studies have shown the potential lack of trust caused by a perceived misalignment of values and identity. This can be seen in the way in which participants described what they saw as the values of the industry, focussing upon profit and production. This misalignment can add to the distance between the industry and communities, which is further exacerbated by the perceptions that decision-making is out-with of local areas. Together this could create a gulf between the two, ultimately making trust harder to achieve. Using a grounded and qualitative approach allowed for a finer scale analysis has shed light upon the complexities that make up SLO for the fin-fish farming industry. It has highlighted the influential role that community and industry identity can have upon SLO. Whilst the qualitative nature of this work means that it should be not be generalized outside of the study areas, the results reflect what has been shown in the wider literature, that SLO is especially influenced by the social and cultural context in which these relationships are attempting to be built . However, these results are also novel in revealing how a communities’ place attachment could influence how it perceives fin-fish farming companies. As well as showing how they can impact perceptions of industry identity. This matters as companies look to SLO frameworks when enacting community engagement. Measures used within the aquaculture industry with the aim to ultimately improve SLO, such as third party certification or community benefit schemes, may fail to improve SLO if they do little to improve the idea of the industry as “outsiders”. How the aquaculture industry could improve this is a question for further research, but also bears reflection as to whether these incompatibilities between industry and communities is something that can be fixed, or is a results of greater chasms between local communities identity experiences of multinational companies.

Accessible water volume and distance from surface water are important water sub-factors which influences on eucalyptus farming potential. Though eucalyptus species tolerate drought to different degrees, studies in southern Iran have demonstrated that reduction of water decreases tree diameters and heights . During periods of drought or in arid climates, irrigation is essential to support tree growth . Based on this research, annual volume of water accessible in most of the study area is sufficient for eucalyptus farming . Though water salinity is a limiting factor in eucalyptus growth, some species of eucalyptus are tolerant to salinity . Nearly fifty years ago, E. camaldulensis was recommended for cultivation in Khuzestan Province because of its tolerance to salinity . In most of study area, EC for surface water and groundwater is<4 ds/m and this makes these areas suitable for eucalyptus wood-farming . The climate sub-factors were less important than the other subfactors: annual wind speed mean was the most important sub-factor, and annual minimum temperature mean , annual temperature mean , annual relative humidity mean , and minimum temperature followed in order of importance. Annual wind speed mean is the most important factor limiting eucalyptus farming in Khuzestan Province. Eucalyptus is generally sensitive to higher wind speeds , but some species tolerate wind better than others. For example, the ratio of diameter to height is greater in E. microtheca than in E. camaldulensis,led grow lights making the former more resistant to high speed winds . The negative effect of certain wind characteristics on eucalyptus survival has been documented: warm wind decreased survival of eucalyptus seedlings in Fars Province .

Annual minimum temperature mean was second most important climate sub-factor. Eucalyptus is a tropical species and is vulnerable to cold . However, species of eucalyptuses tolerate temperature differently; as E. microtheca is less affected by minimum temperature than E. camaldulensis . Annual maximum temperature mean, maximum temperature, and annual rainfall mean are weighted equivalently and they were the least important determinants for eucalyptus farming in Khuzestan Province. There are shown to be suitable climatic conditions for eucalyptus wood-farming in Khuzestan province based on the results . And of the land cover sub-factors, non-planted sandy hills had the greatest impact of determining land suitability for eucalyptus wood-farming. Other studies have found that eucalyptus thrives in the sandy hills of the Albaji region near Ahvaz City in Khuzestan Province and similar results were found by others . Non-cultivated lands near the Jihad Nasr channels were the next land cover conditions of importance in eucalyptus wood-farming. Though these lands have not been evaluated before, water channels and drainage are suitable characteristics that enhance potential of these lands for eucalyptus plantations. The Jihad Nasr lands are also suitable for eucalyptus farming. Although, the Jihad Nasr lands are private at present, the wide and flat expanse of these lands, water channels around them and a proper drainage system that can decrease water salinity, makes them very suitable for eucalyptus farming. Eucalyptus plantations could replace other crops in these lands; this would only happen if it was economically justifiable and if eucalyptus seedlings were provided by the Forests, Rangelands, and Watershed Organization of Iran . Although, a large area of lands are recognized as suitable for eucalyptus farming , thepriority for wood-farming should be the large patches , because plantations on larger plots would be more economically viable operations. This research showed that accessible water in sufficient amounts, soil salinity, wind speed, and unplanted sandy hills are the sub-factors that most dictate land suitability for eucalyptus wood-farming in southern Iran.

Analysis of the wood-farming potential map based on FAHP showed that 16.8% of the study area is very suitable and 18% is suitable for eucalyptus wood-farming. Additionally, 16.55% of the study area is neither suitable nor unsuitable, 30.23% is unsuitable, and 18.42% is very unsuitable for eucalyptus wood-farming. More than 34% of the study area would be appropriate for eucalyptus wood-farming. This is confirms the hypothesis that Khuzestan Province has very good potential for eucalyptus wood-farming considering eucalyptus’ ecological, climatic, hydrologic, and edaphic needs. The tropical climate, large water supply, proper edaphic conditions especially in the northern half of the province, and existence of sandy lands makes this province ideal for eucalyptus farming. The results of other studies confirm this potential for the province . In the future studies, economic conditions should be considered for eucalyptus plantation in the province as well. The cost of maintaining eucalyptus seedlings during logging period should be assigned by FRWOI. For example, eucalyptus is sensitive to fire , therefore assigning a cost to monitor and protect eucalyptus plantation against future fires is very important , especially in Khuzestan Province. Validation of the wood-farming potential map showed an OA of 82% and a k of 0.71, based on the empirical data from successful eucalyptus plantations in Khuzestan Province. This demonstrates that the FAHP method has high validity for identifying the suitable lands for eucalyptus wood-farming and the wood-farming potential map is valid as well. Many studies have shown similarly high accuracies of FAHP method for environmental assessments . This study is the first to use the FAHP method to predict lands that would be most suitable for eucalyptus wood-farming; and it did so accurately. There are, however, some limitations regarding this approach. The lack of experts and specialists who answer to surveys may have created inconsistency in the results of this approach . In this case, if CR is more than 0.1, the survey procedures should be redone. Furthermore, a lack of experts on the subject is another limitation of this approach. An insufficient amount of data about successful eucalyptus plantations was an important challenge.

In this study, 80 polygons of successful eucalyptus plantation with a total area of 5002.45 ha provided the empirical data. These data were used to validate the wood-farming potential map. Eucalyptus plantations that were unsuccessful, however, were not included in this analysis and they were also removed from the eucalyptus plantation map. For more complete validation, more data are needed from sites of successful eucalyptus plantations in Khuzestan Province. Groundwater is an important water source for drinking, domestic and agricultural purposes particularly in rural areas. Meanwhile, the rural areas are faced with groundwater contamination due to various contamination sources including agricultural fertilizers, livestock manures, and domestic wastes . Recently, the livestock manures are paid attention to as a critical source of groundwater contamination as livestock farming has been expanded and intensified to meet the increased demand for meat . Livestock manures are spread on agricultural fields as fertilizers without composting or temporarily piled up in livestock farming fields without appropriate management until they are transported for treatment , which creates a livestock manure-derived groundwater plume in aquifers persistently affected by fertilizers. For instance, the amount of livestock manures increased from 71,530 tons a day in 1992 to 177,110 tons a day in 2012 in South Korea, and was estimated to be 185,069 tons a day in 2018 . Improper disposal of livestock manures has become a major cause of groundwater contamination in agro-livestock farming areas.Among the inorganic contaminants, nitrogen compounds are a major contaminant found in the LDGP at three forms , of which nitrate is the final product of nitrification and shows the widespread distribution in groundwater due to high mobility and low absorptivity . High levels of nitrate in groundwater are reported to cause diseases in humans such as methemoglobinemia and gastric and colorectal cancer in addition to ecological risks such as eutrophication and algal blooming in surface water . In addition, livestock manures are a source of pathogens such as bacteria, parasites and viruses ; many of those pathogens have been found to survive in the subsurface environment . Thus, careless management of livestock manures can induce pathogen-induced diseases including waterborne diseases on livestock and humans. In order to protect the rural groundwater quality from the livestock manure, it is essential to characterize the spatial and vertical extent of a LDGP. However, strawberry gutter system the evaluation of impacts by an individual pollution source in groundwater is challenging because various point and/or non-point sources complicatedly coexist .

For instance, major hydrochemical compositions including nitrate and SO4 2- come from both fertilizers and livestock manures and hydrochemically evolve in aquifers depending on redox conditions . Thus, recently the dual isotopes of nitrate are widely used to distinguish contamination sources , while they are expensive and time-consuming, and occasionally not applicable because of the isotopic overlap of nitrate sources . An integrated hydrochemical index can be used as an alternative tool to distinguish contamination sources as the river water quality indices and may reduce the uncertainties caused by the isotopic compositions. For the development of hydrochemical indices, hydrochemical indicators should be selected as in Solovey et al. who used Cl- /Br- to determine peatlands affected by anthropopressure and Ca2+/Mg2+ to determine the dominance of rainwater in a fen. Then the hydrochemical indicators should be coupled to provide a single index. Principal component analysis has been widely applied to assess major geochemical processes in aquifers and to choose hydrochemical indicators to address each geochemical process . When PCA is conducted using the isometric log-ratio transformed hydrochemical parameters, the ilr coordinates of a subcomposition can be recommended as a method to integrate the selected ions . This study was conducted to select hydrochemical indicators through the understanding of the hydrochemistry of a LDGP and geochemical processes occurring within the LDGP, and to suggest a hydrochemical index effectively differentiating the LDGP from the pervasive agricultural contamination in shallow unconsolidated aquifers in agro-livestock farming areas. For this purpose, multilevel monitoring wells were installed at both upgradient and downgradient of feedlots and manure piles, and then the hydrochemistry, dual isotopic composition of nitrate, and fecal microorganisms in groundwater with depth were examined. Based on the study result, hydrochemical parameters that differentiated the LDGP were chosen and combined to suggest an integrated hydrochemical index to trace the LDGP in a shallow unconfined aquifer. The applicability of the index was validated using hydrochemical and isotopic compositions from three other agro-livestock farming areas in South Korea. The methodology to select hydrochemical parameters for distinguishing a LDGP and to combine them to develop a hydrochemical index and the biogeochemical processes within the LDGP found in this study will be useful for managing groundwater pollution by livestock manures in agro-livestock farming areas. This study was conducted in an agro-livestock farming area in the Chungnam Province of South Korea , in which the lowland began to be converted to livestock farms from agricultural fields approximately in 1995, and the areal extent of livestock farming was progressively expanded at the down gradient area .

As of 2010, the main land uses included livestock farming and agricultural fields as in Fig. 1a, and livestock farms were located around agricultural fields. The geology consisted of Jurassic biotite granite, which was locally covered with coarse- to medium-grained sand . Colluvium materials such as rock debris, gravel, silt and sand were also observed when MLWs were installed in 2013 . The land surface had elevations in a range of 30 to 50 m above sea level and tended to slope gradually towards the east . In the agricultural fields, which were developed in an upland at elevations of 44 ~ 50 m asl, crops such as peppers, sweet potatoes and beans were cultivated with the application of fertilizers including silicate fertilizers. It should be noted that the application of fertilizers must have occurred all over the study area before 1995 and probably more intensively given that the overuse of fertilizers resulted in the acidification and nitrate contamination of shallow groundwater in South Korea . The use of chemical fertilizers has been regulated since 2004, decreasing the use of chemical fertilizers down to 46% between 1994 and 2014, whereas the use of livestock manures increased by 30% during the same period in South Korea . In the livestock farming area located in a lowland at elevations of 30 ~ 43 m asl, livestock manures were estimated to be produced at a rate of 5,090 kg day− 1 as of 2010 based on a total of 135 dairy cows and average N produced by a dairy cow .