Industrial principles of specialization, simplification and concentration began to be applied to agriculture after the Second World War with positive production results. But it is now widely recognized that this agriculture and food system faces daunting challenges in the decades ahead, including increased human population growth, natural resource depletion, ecological degradation, climate change and escalating energy costs. These challenges have refocused the attention of agriculturalists and food scientists on the question of how we can continue to feed the human species. But these challenges also provide opportunities to rethink and redesign our food system. Agriculturalists are recognizing that resilience is at least as important to food security as maximum production, and consumer concerns provide us with unprecedented opportunities for farmers and consumers to come together as ‘food citizens’ to determine appropriate changes in our food system. To that end it is important to examine the various production systems and infrastructures in an effort to select the most viable options for long-term sustainability.

Along with others, we recognize the impact of human action on environmental quality. At the same time, we note that businesses have entered the ‘green market’. The goal of this paper is to open a discussion about green marketing. We raise questions regarding how firm governance impacts the ability of firms to incorporate environmental objectives into profit maximization. Additionally, we discuss the green marketing strategies that firms have chosen to use, as well as public and private options available for eco-label monitoring and enforcement to avoid additional consumer confusion.

This article illuminates the geographic concept of ‘place’ in local foods. Because the social aspects of local food have been more fully addressed in previous literature, this review focuses instead on the ecological aspects of farming and food. First, the literature on natural resource use in agriculture provides contextual understanding of water use, biodiversity, soils and agro-ecological methods. The complex relationship between climate change and agriculture is described and models assessing the impacts of climate change on agriculture are detailed. The geography of local food is specifically addressed by describing methods for assessing natural resource use in local food, including food miles, consumer transportation, scale and community, agricultural methods and diet. Finally, future research paths are suggested to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental impact of local food. Such research would encompass the geography of local food through development of broader, more inclusive strategy, including the concept of the ‘ecological appetite’ of crops and foods, the union of both social and ecological aspects of resource use, the linkages between rural and urban producers and consumers and the inclusion of farmers’ ecological knowledge. Overall, the geography of local food seeks to assess the where of food production and consumption, while incorporating key issues of how (agro-ecological methods benefiting the community) and what (locally appropriate crops).

Improving energy and resource use in US agriculture begins with the soil. Healthy soils improve air and water quality, increase land productivity, help resist the effects of drought and floods, improve energy efficiency and enhance the ability to mitigate climate change. In 1993, the US Board on Agriculture concluded that national policy should seek to: conserve and enhance soil quality as a fundamental first step to improve the environment; increase the efficiency of nutrient, pesticide and irrigation use in farming systems; increase the resistance of farming systems to erosion and runoff; and make greater use of field and landscape buffer zones, all delivered through farm system management plans. Despite their detailed analysis and thoughtful approach, only a few of their recommendations were implemented. But now, calls from the scientific community to improve resource and energy use in agriculture are becoming more urgent in tone and could help drive policy reform. We review the reasons behind this rising sense of urgency, highlight some of the potential policy drivers along with policy ‘game changers’ and offer policy options. We argue to expand our view of agriculture as a source not only of food, fiber, biofuels and renewable energy but also of other critical ecosystem services, like cleaner water, carbon sequestration and wildlife habitat, and to adjust policies to realize this potential on all agricultural lands. We recommend undertaking a second National Agricultural Land Study as a basis to develop a clear national strategy to help US agriculture meet the challenges it will face in the coming decades. For the short term, we offer incremental policies to improve energy and resource use and, for the long term, we offer a vision of what that national strategy might include once the necessary analyses are completed and consensus is reached.

Food insecurity remains high in most of sub-Saharan African. That insecurity is made even more acute by the increasing scarcity and degradation of natural resources. Low soil fertility is a consistent problem faced by agriculturalists and herders. The dominant international thrust to increase food production has been to stimulate trade, enhanced by technology and its transfer. While international bodies acknowledge the importance of small farmers, they operate as if improving the technologies, trade regimes and value chains that are characteristic of industrial agriculture will have the same results in local ecosystems in developing countries. Price volatility makes access to purchased inputs more risky for smallholders and the governments that subsidize those inputs. The diverse local contexts that serve as the base of African agriculture are thus assumed to be overridden by technology. In contrast, a systems approach that focuses on sustainability of the local ecosystem, social and cultural relationships and economic security can be as, or more productive than industrial agriculture and have a much better opportunity to increase food security in developing countries. Such a systems-based shift in practices, such as the application of conservation agriculture and integrated systemic approaches in Millennium Villages, have potential of addressing household livelihood strategies and production issues in a sustainable, farmer-based way. Resource-conserving agriculture has been shown to increase yields in developing countries. Priority should be given to developing technologies that follow the systems principles of sustainable agriculture, integrating biological and ecological processes (such as nutrient cycling, nitrogen fixation, soil regeneration and biodiversity) into the production processes; minimizing use of non-renewable inputs that cause harm to the environment or to the health of farmers and consumers; and making productive use of the knowledge and skills of farmers and their collective capacities to work together to solve common problems. A variety of models are on the ground in Africa, and there is political will in the African Union to increase investment in agriculture. What sort of investments, policy interventions and capacity building are more effective in increasing productivity and the well-being of agricultural producers? Are strategies aimed at reducing the number of people involved in farming and herding viable in the context of a stagnant world economy?

Recent sociological analysis of the expansion of the biofuels industry internationally has noted the paradox between the purported global environmental benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by replacing fossil fuels with biofuels, and the potential for distinctly negative environmental impacts experienced at local sites of biofuels production. The state, in both the USA and the EU, has played a prominent role in promoting the development and expansion of biofuels production through government mandates and incentives, but the state's role in governing the potentially (negative) economic, social or environmental impacts of biofuels production on local communities has been much more limited in scope. We review the environmental sociological literature to frame analysis of how the state is governing the benefits and burdens brought by the ethanol industry to rural communities in Kansas and Iowa. Drawing on data from community surveys, focus group and individual interviews and analysis of environmental violations, the paper examines the local impacts of biofuels production in three case-study communities. Findings suggest that local residents do not express many concerns about environmental impacts and that the state has played a modest role in governing the negative local environmental impacts. We argue that this lack of concern is related to the histories of these rural communities, which have long depended on resource extractive industries and currently are desperate for economic growth. We find that criticisms of negative environmental impacts are muted in relation to purported economic benefits and to other comparable industries. These community case studies illustrate some of the challenges, both at the practical and theoretical levels, of governing biofuels production.

Agricultural biotechnology has been largely opposed by advocates in the sustainable agriculture movement, despite claims by the technology's proponents that it holds the promise to deliver both production (economic) and environmental benefits, two legs of the sustainability stool. We argue in this paper that participants in this polarized debate are talking past each other because assumptions about biotechnology and sustainability remain simplistic and poorly defined. Genetically engineered (GE) herbicide-resistant and insect-resistant crop varieties are the most visible current forms of agricultural biotechnology, and thus the form of biotechnology that many in the sustainability movement react to. However, these crops represent a biotechnology option that has paid insufficient attention to the integrated and systemic requirements of sustainable agriculture. In particular, common definitions of sustainable agriculture reinforce the need to include consideration of socio-economic distributive or equity effects into any assessment of sustainability. However, the frameworks that have been proposed to assess the potential for GE crops to enhance sustainable agriculture generally neglect this essential socio-economic dimension. We present an analysis that augments the sustainability frameworks to include the full suite of environmental, economic and social impacts. A review of the latest science on each impact category reveals that crop biotechnology cannot be fully assessed with respect to fostering a more sustainable agriculture due to key gaps in evidence, especially for socio-economic distributive effects. While the first generation of GE crops generally has made progress in reducing agriculture's environmental footprint and improving adopting farmers' economic well-being, we conclude that these early products fall short of the technology's capacity to promote a more sustainable agriculture because of the failure of those developing and promoting the technology to fully engage all stakeholders and address salient equity issues. To realize the sustainability potential of biotechnology will require fundamental changes in the way public and private research and technology development and commercialization are structured and operated. We identify new approaches in these areas that could make this powerful biological science more compatible with sustainable agriculture.

This article discusses the mitigation and adaptation potential of organic agricultural systems along three main features: farming system design, cropland management and grassland and livestock management. An important potential contribution of organically managed systems to climate change mitigation is identified in the careful management of nutrients and, hence, the reduction of N2O emissions from soils. Another high mitigation potential of organic agriculture lies in carbon sequestration in soils. In a first estimate, the emission reduction potential by abstention from mineral fertilizers is calculated to be about 20% and the compensation potential by carbon sequestration to be about 40–72% of the world's current annual agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but further research is needed to consolidate these numbers. On the adaptation side, organic agriculture systems have a strong potential for building resilient food systems in the face of uncertainties, through farm diversification and building soil fertility with organic matter. Additionally, organic agriculture offers alternatives to energy-intensive production inputs such as synthetic fertilizers which are likely to be further limited for poor rural populations by rising energy prices. In developing countries, organic agricultural systems achieve equal or even higher yields, as compared to the current conventional practices, which translate into a potentially important option for food security and sustainable livelihoods for the rural poor in times of climate change. Certified organic products cater for higher income options for farmers and, therefore, can serve as promoters for climate-friendly farming practices worldwide.

Structural change in the US dairy industry toward fewer and very large farms has fueled interest and government funding of research into the feasibility of constructing anaerobic digesters (ADs) on large operations as a waste management strategy. Some groups opposed to increasing scale and concentration in the livestock sectors, including dairy, also oppose ADs because of the connection with larger scale operations and the potential for facilitating increased concentration in agricultural production. But the connection between AD technology and large scale is a social construction promoted by its incorporation into the debates over agricultural industrialization. The technology per se is essentially scale neutral and its scale-implications are artifacts of design choices, as is seen by its successful application to both very small farms around the world and large-scale agricultural enterprises in the USA. Using a survey of dairy farmers in New York, we find that interest in AD technology occurs at all farm sizes; and that factors other than farm size are important in determining interest in the technology. We conclude that the technoscientific question raised by these findings is: will applications to, and interest by, smaller dairy farmer operators result in shifts in policy and funding priorities toward more diverse agricultural research agendas regarding AD technology?