Organic fertilizers improve soil fertility in oil palm plantations, based on small-scale (<30 ha), short-term (3–5 yr) studies, but the response is not equal across soil classes. Since organic fertilizers are costly to handle and apply, relative to mineral fertilizers, producers need to know where and how frequently to apply organic...

Low inherent fertility of tropical soils and degradation, nutrient deficiency and water stress are the key factors that hamper rainfed agriculture in semi-arid West Africa. Conservation Agriculture (CA) is currently promoted in the region as a technology to reduce soil degradation, mitigate the effect of droughts and increase crop productivity...

Agricultural policymakers are addressing the sustainable development issue by designing new agricultural systems. Farmers are ultimately asked to make deep changes at field scale. Designing cropping systems has previously been done using prototyping methodologies. Prototyping methodologies use a five-step designing process at field scale and request multicriteria analysis of the...

With increasing pressure on farmers to improve the performance of their cropping systems, there is a growing need to design cropping systems that respond concurrently to environmental, agronomic and socioeconomic constraints. However, the trade-offs between ecosystem services, including provisioning services, can vary considerably from plot to plot. Using a typology...

Agroecosystems represent 38 % of global land use. Agroecosystems are located close to human settlements and are managed to produce food and fibers, traded in markets. Agroecosystems also produce other goods and services essential to human beings, such as climate regulation, flood mitigation, and landscape amenity. Economists and ecologists have...

Farmers are facing serious plant protection issues and phytosanitary risks, in particular in the tropics. Such issues are food insecurity, lower income in traditional low-input agroecosystems, adverse effects of pesticide use on human health and on the environment in intensive systems and export restrictions due to strict regulations on quarantine...