Current Agricultural Systems Research Articles

Adaptation of agriculture to climate change

Preparing agriculture for adaptation to climate change requires advance knowledge of how climate will change and when. The direct physical and biological impacts on plants and animals must be understood. The indirect impacts on agriculture's resource base of soils, water and genetic resources must also be known. We lack such information now and will, likely, for some time to come. Thus impact assessments for agriculture can only be conjectural at this time. How-ever, guidance can be gotten from an improved understanding of current climatic vulnerabilities of agriculture and its resource base, from application of a realistic range of climate change scenarios to impact assessment, and from consideration of the complexity of current agricultural systems and the range of adaptation techniques and policies now available and likely to be available in the future.

Agriculture in Transition

Agriculture in the United States has been successful in terms of productivity, assets, and employment. Maintaining our agriculture, however, is becoming more cosily in terms of declining resources and offsite environmental damage. Some of the very technology enhancing productivity is part of the cause. Over half the energy costs to produce U.S. crops are for fertilizers and fuel for farm machinery. Tillage and irrigation often bring about heavy soil erosion and water pollution. Some pesticides used to protect our crops may pollute the water supply. Valuable water resources are diminished by heavy irrigation. Adaptation of crops to our current agricultural systems leads to germplasm uniformity. While most practices and technologies that maintain current cannot be abandoned, some modifications are needed to promote a more sustainable agriculture. Presently, U.S. agriculture is in transition. A trend to adopt practices that favor reduced inputs and costs has appeared. Such practices also conserve resources a...

System analysis and the world food system

The current world agricultural system generates persistent hunger, economic instability, and ecological degradation. Quantitative analysis has been used primarily to predict or optimize small parts of this system, not to engage with its larger problems, and not to redesign the system to eliminate those problems. New questions are posed here about world agriculture; several systems studies are described that begin to deal with those questions; and a challenge is put forth to combine systems tools with transcendent human qualities, to bring forth a stable, sufficient, sustainable global food system.