Guest Editorial, part of a Special Feature on A Social-Ecological Analysis of Diversified Farming Systems: Benefits, Costs, Obstacles, and Enabling Policy Frameworks Diversified Farming Systems: An…

By C. Kremen, Alastair Iles, Chris Bacon. 2012

606 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This Special Issue on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. We first define Diversified Farming Systems (DFS) as farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity at multiple spatial and/or temporal scales in order to maintain ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture, such as soil fertility, pest and disease control, water use efficiency, and pollination. We explore to what extent DFS overlap or are differentiated from existing concepts such as sustainable, multifunctional, organic or ecoagriculture. DFS are components of social-ecological systems that depend on certain combinations of traditional and contemporary knowledge, cultures, practices, and governance structures. Further, as ecosystem services are generated and regenerated within a DFS, the resulting social benefits in turn support the maintenance of the DFS, enhancing its ability to provision these services sustainably. We explore how social institutions, particularly alternative agri-food networks and agrarian movements, may serve to promote DFS approaches, but note that such networks and movements have other primary goals and are not always explicitly connected to the environmental and agroecological concerns embodied within the DFS concept. We examine global trends in agriculture to investigate to what extent industrialized forms of agriculture are replacing former DFS, assess the current and potential contributions of DFS to food security, food sovereignty and the global food supply, and determine where and under what circumstances DFS are expanding rather than contracting.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/015aa3314b23640bbd437663e4dade5d9e71b624

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Citations in the corpus

A Sustainable Agricultural Future Relies on the Transition to Organic Agroecological Pest Management (2018, background): “Risks regarding occupational exposure to farm workers, especially immigrant communities, also fits into a broader discussion of environmental and social justice issues [72].”
Synthesis, part of a Special Feature on A Social-Ecological Analysis of Diversified Farming Systems: Benefits, Costs, Obstacles, and Enabling Policy Frameworks Ecosystem Services in Biologically Diversified versus Conventional Farming Systems: Benefits, Externalities, and Trade-Offs (2012, background): “Finally, these studies illustrate the concept that is core to diversified farming systems: cross-scale heterogeneity is critical for conserving biodiversity, which in turn underlies fundamental ecosystem services generating essential inputs to farming (Kremen et al. 2012).”
A social-ecological framework for analyzing and designing integrated crop–livestock systems from farm to territory levels (2016, background): “The nature and spatial distribution of crops, grasslands, animals and semi-natural habitats can be adapted to enhance biodiversity and increase delivery of ES at field and landscape levels (De Groot et al., 2010; Power, 2010; Díaz et al. 2011; Kremen et al., 2012).”
Explaining the 'hungry farmer paradox': Smallholders and fair trade cooperatives navigate seasonality and change in Nicaragua's corn and coffee markets (2014, background): “…certified organic systems to less-understood perspectives such as biodynamic farming, and these approaches generate smaller negative environmental impacts than industrialized monoculture production (Kremen et al., 2012; Pimentel et al., 2005; Gomiero and Pimentel, 2011; Carlisle and Miles, 2013).”
Crop Diversification for Improved Weed Management: A Review (2021, background): “A large-scale monoculture agriculture system has deeply entrenched across the world ensuing difficulty for any alternative production system such as diversified farming to flourish [154,155].”
Crop–livestock integration beyond the farm level: a review (2016, background): “colonizing the farm; Altieri 1999) and adapted management practices that are integrated over different temporal and spatial scales (Altieri 1999; Kremen et al. 2012).”
Ecological intensification of agriculture — sustainable by nature (2014, background): “Other models of ecological intensification such as eco-agriculture [9] or diversified systems [35] rely on similar principles as those that form the pillars of agroecology — diversity, efficiency, recycling, regulation — and deal mostly with large scale farming systems.”