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Due to the increasing awareness of climate change, depletion of natural resources, and increasing world population, companies in the agri-food sector need to redesign their existing supply chains and take into account both the economic and environmental impact of their operations. In practice not all the required information is available in advance due to various sources of uncertainty in agri-food supply chains. In this research a multi-objective two-stage stochastic programming model is proposed to analyse and evaluate the economic and environmental impacts to account for uncertainty in agri-food supply chains. A mushroom supply chain in the Netherlands is presented as an illustrative case study. Optimal production planning decisions calculated with a two-stage stochastic programming model are compared with the results of an equivalent deterministic model. The results of the optimizations show that accounting for stochasticity in important model parameters can reduce the difference between expected and realized economic performance by approximately 4% on average. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that including stochastic model parameters can reduce the environmental impact without compromising the current economic performance. Given the assumptions in the setup of the case study and the available information, it is concluded that applying a 2-stage stochastic programming approach for production planning decisions can lead to improved economic and environmental performance in an agri-food supply chain. New findings in real-life case studies are needed to get profound insights and understanding on the impact of uncertainty on production planning decisions in sustainable agri-food supply chains.

The transition to a low carbon future is starting to affect landscapes around the world. In order for this landscape transformation to be sustainable, renewable energy technologies should not cause critical trade-offs between the provision of energy and that of other ecosystem services such as food production. This literature review advances the body of knowledge on sustainable energy transition with special focus on ecosystem services-based approaches and methods. Two key issues emerge from this review: only one sixth of the published applications on the relation between renewable energy and landscape make use of the ecosystem service framework. Secondly, the applications that do address ecosystem services for landscape planning and design lack efficient methods and spatial reference systems that accommodate both cultural and regulating ecosystem services. Future research efforts should be directed to further advancing the spatial reference systems, the use of participatory mapping and landscape visualizations tools for cultural ecosystem services and the elaboration of landscape design principles.

Need for reduction of energy use in greenhouse production has increased. First objective was to develop and validate a dynamic air temperature model. Second objective was to minimize total energy input to the greenhouse, for pre-set temperature boundaries. Optimal control techniques were used to minimize total energy input (cooling and heating). Results confirm that air temperature is on the upper boundary when cooling is applied and on the lower boundary when heating is applied. This work is a first step toward optimal deployment of a large array of possible options for the grower to optimally satisfy heat or cooling.

Molinate (S-ethyl-azepane-1-carbothioate) is a thiocarbamate herbicide used in rice cultivation for the control of grass weeds. Environmental contamination with molinate is of major concern due to the adverse effects described both for humans and animals. Molinate hydrolase, a novel amidohydrolase previously characterized, is responsible for the initial breakdown of molinate, cleaving the thioester bond of molinate, releasing ethanethiol and azepane-1-carboxylate (ACA). Biotechnology is the key for sustainable farming. With advances in biotechnology, bioremediation has become one of the most rapidly developing fields of environmental restoration. Through the microencapsulation of molinate hydrolase, we are aiming to develop a bioremediation process for the effective molinate degradation in rice paddies. The purpose of this work was to develop and validate an UV method to effectively quantify the substrate (molinate) in further assays with free and microencapsulated molinate hydrolase. The analytical method was validated and the main parameters, as limit of detection, linearity range, precision and accuracy were determined, and compared to those obtained by HPLC (regarding free enzyme kinetics). Both methods show to be linear (r > 0.999) over the concentration range of 0.005-0.150 mM molinate. The global uncertainty, estimated accordingly to the bottom-up approach used by Eurachem, was estimated for both methods. The UV analytical method is effective and seems that it can be applied in future for the quantification of molinate breakdown by free and encapsulated molinate hydrolase.

We argue that an understanding of livestock farming as normative practice clarifies how sustainability is to be understood in livestock farming. The sustainability of livestock farming is first approached by investigating its identity. We argue that the economic aspect qualifies and the formative aspect founds the livestock farming practice. Observing the normativity related to these aspects will be the first task for the livestock farmer. In addition, we can distinguish conditioning norms applicable to the livestock farming practice which should be observed for competent performance of the practice. Failing to do justice to this normativity might affect the practice’s sustainability only in the long term—this is especially the case with conditioning norms. Motives to observe normativity have, therefore, the character of an ultimate conviction regarding the flourishing of the practice. Finally, the sustainability of the livestock farming practice crucially depends on the broader food system of which it is part.

SUMMARYWe demonstrated experimentally that coconut husk ash is an excellent mineral fertilizer for immature coconut hybrids on developed peat, providing potassium (K) in particular. Coconut husk ash performed as well as potassium chloride (KCl) in a proportion of 2–2.5 to 1. At four years, 99% of coconut palms fertilized with husk ash, 92% of coconut palms fertilized with KCl and 26% of control palms were sexually differentiated. The cumulative yield in the first two harvesting years more than trebled between control palms (26 nuts per tree) and the palms fertilized with KCl (93 nuts per tree) or husk ash (105 nuts per tree). This is an important result, given the intensity of K deficiency and the increasing cost of imported fertilizers. Although coconut husk ash will never totally replace K fertilizer, it can recycle a substantial proportion of nutrients in a coconut plantation. It now remains to optimize its use on an estate level, by examining the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of its mass production and determining conditions for maximum efficiency.

Biomass production helps address the worldwide energy demand. However, some controversial issues have been identified such as the possible conflict between the goal of increasing vegetable biomass and food production and the need to limit environmental impacts. In Mediterranean region, where the supply of some natural resources appears significantly limited (e.g., water) and the competition for land is higher than it was in the past, the objective of evaluating environmental burdens at a regional scale represents an important issue, especially if the assessment considers the farmer scope of increasing productivity. Using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) "from cradle to field gate" approach, this paper aims to evaluate land-based environmental sustainability related to four energy crop options. We carried out a LCA differentiating between annual and perennial species and between irrigated (giant reed and sorghum) and rainfed crops (cardoon and milk thistle) to determine their performances and impacts within the same context. The findings suggest that irrigated crops generate larger impacts on the environment than rainfed species and that annual crops (both irrigated and rainfed) are more damaging than the respective perennial crops. The damages were expressed in Ecopoints, where one Ecopoint corresponds to one thousandth of the annual overall environmental burden of an average European inhabitant. Ecopoints for sorghum, giant reed, milk thistle and cardoon are equal to 361, 288, 146, and 138, respectively. Except for irrigation, fertilizers were found to be the input with the largest effect, accounting for 37% (giant reed) to 75% (cardoon) of the environmental burden on the system. The results do not suggest the presence of a winning crop option - i.e., a crop that shows the best environmental performances everywhere and in all categories - since regional environmental burdens are simultaneously related to different factors (e.g., land allocation, crop productivity, and degree of practice intensification) that drive farmer choice. Finally, following a dynamic and innovative perspective, we evaluated the trade-off between productivity and environmental burden for each crop simulating an increasing product variation. We found that environmental burdens would increase more proportionally than crop yields done. Especially the latter finding provides interesting suggestions on energy cropping system integration within agricultural planning under stressed natural resource conditions.

Since 2003, Italian farmers have planted over 4000 ha of short rotation coppice (SRC), established almost exclusively with poplar clones and harvested every second year. Currently, there is a strong interest towards extending rotation age and diversifying tree species, in order to increase product quality and to exploit less fertile sites. That implies harvesting larger and harder trees, which may prove challenging for existing harvesting units. This study offers preliminary data on the productivity, efficiency, and cost offered by two new harvesting units, specifically designed for handling larger trees. These were a Krone Big-X forage harvester fitted with the HTM header and a John Deere 7400 forage harvester fitted with the Biopoplar header. The machines were tested on poplar, robinia, and willow. Gross machine productivity ranged from 15 to 50 green tonnes per scheduled machine hour. The actual harvest rate (the productivity of cutting and chipping only) reached 60 t h-1. Both harvesters offered reasonable harvesting costs, generally in the range of 14 EUR t -1 (1.8EUR GJ -1). Both machines were pre-commercial prototypes and their performance will be further improved in the eventual commercial versions. The study also highlighted the excellent performance of robinia, which proved superior to poplar on the same fields, and reached yields in excess of 15 odt ha-1year-1. A further advantage of robinia is the low moisture content at harvest, which may help solving the fuel moisture issues inherent to the current single-pass cut-and-chip harvesting systems.