A flowering inter-row vegetation can only fulfil its potential in promoting beneficial arthropods when the sown flowering plant species are given the opportunity to bloom and produce ripe seeds. Therefore, maintaining a perennial species-rich inter-row vegetation requires some adjustments to the farmers’ mulching regime.

Marcinelle is a system experiment involving 28 dairy cows and their offspring, implemented since 2020 on 62 hectares of permanent grassland at the INRAE Herbipôle experimental farm in Marcenat (French Massif central, 1,100 m asl). It was co-designed in 2019 in a participatory process, and is driven by a collective of researchers and regional stakeholders, including local farmers and citizens.

Agroecological food production in mountain regions, particularly within protected areas, offers specific values but also faces challenges such as production scale and the dispersed distribution. Mountain agroecological food products cannot compete in terms of quantity or price, but rather need to stand in terms of quality and social and ecological values.

Cultural barriers to agroecology are transversal and ubiquitous in Europe, frequently taking the shape of disregard, lack of pride or even shame, for traditional and family farming and food practices. Particularly in remote, mountainous and southern rural areas, making agroecology attractive to the general public and particularly to the youth remains a challenge.

The methodology of sowing a cover crop mixture is usually determined by the existing vegetation of the inter-rows, the availability of machinery and the species of the mixture.

Irrigation is one of the agrotechnical measures that can eliminate or at least mitigate the effects of drought in agriculture. On the other hand, where irrigation is introduced, agriculture is the largest consumer of water.

A recent review highlights that diverse forage mixtures on sown grasslands can significantly reduce (or at least stabilise) the negative effects of drought on forage production. By combining the diversity in plant species and genotype composition, grasslands can mitigate drought impacts on sown and permanent grasslands under varying climatic conditions.

Climate change increases the vulnerability of grassland-based production systems given that it affects the annual distribution of forage production and enhances its inter-annual variability.

Today, research and development organisations are urged to collaborate with stakeholders to design and test ‘solutions’ that are considered virtuous and desirable to all involved. This changes the missions and work of those conducting research and development activities.

Stripcropping is a cultivation method in which multiple crops are grown side by side in long, narrow strips. How should farmers determine strip width and length? A factsheet on stripcropping and mechanization summarizes key considerations.

Stripcropping is often regarded as a system that enhances resilience. But does it indeed increase biodiversity, and how does this affect pests and diseases? A factsheet for farmers summarizes recent research.

Stripcropping is a cultivation method where multiple crops are grown side by side in long, narrow strips. Does it affect yields? Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands, researchers summarized results from three Dutch organic farm experiments in a farmer factsheet.

Based on the game of goose, this board game tells the story of Poul Genm (in Guadeloupean Creole) settling on a mixed farming and livestock farm in the Caribbean, highlighting its good initiatives and missteps.

In an attempt to halt and reverse biodiversity losses, the European Commission has proposed a new regulation, the Nature Restoration Law (NRL). It could become a cornerstone of Europe’s ambitions to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services for decades to come

Efficient environmental policies are urgently needed globally, to combat critical challenges including climate change, biodiversity losses, water scarcity and land degradation. But there is an increasing tendency of some actors to contest environmental protection policies, often using misinformation or pseudo-scientific claims. It is critical that scientists weigh in on such public debates, to provide an unbiased assessment of the science, and help prevent erroneous arguments from influencing decision-making.

Highlights:

We analyse how agroecological principles were mobilised in five case studies.

We propose a new eight-category framework to categorise barriers and enablers.

Different equilibria occurred between agroecosystem and food-system level principles.

Cooperation networks were always reported among the enablers for scaling out.

Policy response needs to go beyond on-farm support and look downstream and upstream.

Agroecology is a new area of knowledge with an emerging body of experience linking experiments, research and action-oriented innovations targeting enhanced food systems’ resilience, environmental and socio-economic sustainability at the farm, organisational and institutional levels.

Highlights:

A spatially-explicit approach to evaluate and prioritise LF restoration.

Clustering landscape characteristics help identify priority areas for LF restoration.

94.4% of Brandenburg's landscapes fall short of the 10% landscape feature target.

Focusing on low-production areas at local scale can help reach the 10 % target.

Farmers’ acceptance and landscape characteristics are vital for successful adoption.

This paper presents a conceptualization of radical food democracy (RFD) which links the diverse economies approach of Gibson-Graham with Tully’s notion of diverse citizenship. Despite its invaluable contribution to theorizing the role of alternative food networks (AFNs) in transforming unsustainable industrial food systems, the diverse economies scholarship has been criticized for essentializing the autonomy of alternative economic practices - hence risking to confound emancipatory social change with punctuated forms of “local,” “quality,” “organic certified” products, which nevertheless remain embedded in market-mediated capitalist relations, and displacement and/or deferral of negative impacts. 

Climate change will increase average temperatures and the frequency and intensity of summertime droughts; those shifts will in turn affect forage production in grassland-based livestock farms. Farmers will accordingly likely have to implement adaptation strategies to cope with the effects of climate change.