Eco-efficient agriculture: concepts, challenges, and opportunities.

By B. Keating, Peter S. Carberry, Prem S. Bindraban, Senthold Asseng, Holger Meinke, J. Dixon. 2010

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Eco-efficiency in the simplest of terms is about achieving more with less�more agricultural outputs, in terms of quantity and quality, for less input of land, water, nutrients, energy, labor, or capital. The concept of eco-effi ciency encompasses both the ecological and economic dimensions of sustainable agriculture. Social and institutional dimensions of sustainability, while not explicitly captured in eco-effi ciency measures, remain critical barriers and opportunities on the pathway toward more eco-effi cient agriculture. This paper explores the multidimensionality of the eco-effi ciency concept as it applies to agriculture across diverse spatial and temporal scales, from cellular metabolisms through to crops, farms, regions, and ecosystems. These dimensions of eco-effi ciency are integrated through the presentation and exploration of a framework that explores an efficiency frontier between agricultural outputs and inputs, investment, or risk. The challenge for agriculture in the coming decades will be to increase productivity of agricultural lands in line with the increasing demands for food and fiber. Achieving such eco-effi ciency, while addressing risk and variability, will be a major challenge for future agriculture. Often, risk will be a critical issue influencing adoption; it needs explicit attention in the diagnosis and intervention steps toward enhancing eco-effi ciency. To ensure food security, systems analysis and modeling approaches, combined with farmer-focused experimentation and resource assessment, will provide the necessary robust approaches to raise the eco-effi ciency of agricultural systems.

Subfields: Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ccebb055840e7422183d6e90ee55f16d4d922af

How researchers see this paper

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In Ecology

1. Paul C. Struik
2. T. Kuyper
3. L. Brussaard
4. P. Tittonell

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. T. Kuyper
2. L. Brussaard
3. P. Tittonell

Citations in the corpus

• Sustainable intensification in agriculture: the richer shade of green. A review (2017, background): “…production per unit of land and probably per unit of labor as well; at the same time, it will reduce the production per unit of fertilizer or per unit of cash, if other inputs are not increased (or at least optimized) at the same time, based on the Law of Diminishing Returns (Keating et al. 2010).”
• Ecological intensification of agriculture — sustainable by nature (2014, background): “[14] reintroduced the concept when analysing input elasticity (water and nitrogen) in agriculture in a paper presented at the 2009 Science Forum of the CGIAR.”
• Deconstructing and unpacking scientific controversies in intensification and sustainability: why the tensions in concepts and values? (2014, background): “[19] suggested options for making agriculture more ‘eco-efficient’: based on the simple notion that efficiency refers to output per unit of input, ‘eco-efficiency’ is the output of food and fibre relative to the input of ecological”