Eco‐efficient Agriculture: Concepts, Challenges, and Opportunities

Abstract

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‐efficiency encompasses both the ecological and economic dimensions of sustainable agriculture. Social and institutional dimensions of sustainability, while not explicitly captured in eco‐efficiency measures, remain critical barriers and opportunities on the pathway toward more eco‐efficient agriculture. This paper explores the multidimensionality of the eco‐efficiency 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‐efficiency 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‐efficiency, 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‐efficiency. 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‐efficiency of agricultural systems.

Assessing the impacts of livestock production on biodiversity in rangeland ecosystems

“…Intensification based on high AKST is not a matter of doing more of the same on a smaller area of land. It must be an ecoefficient intensification, i.e., covering the interrelationships and trade-offs among production, conservation, economic, and social values (31)(32)(33).…”

Agricultural System

“…The resource efficiency of agriculture has become a central concept for scientists (de Wit 1992;Hayashi 2000;Keating et al 2010;Altieri et al 2012) and policy makers. As the Food and Agriculture Organization has collected and published estimates on emissions of nitrous oxide and methane per country, it is useful to set these emissions into relation with the agricultural outputs of the countries concerned, as a rough estimator of environmental resource efficiency.…”

Assessing the sustainability of wheat-based cropping systems using simulation modelling: sustainability = 42?

“…It has been frequently proposed that bio-physical systems approaches using simulation techniques are suitable for quantifying agricultural sustainability (Monteith 1996;Hansen 1996;Kropff et al 2001) in a way that is ''literal, system-oriented, quantitative, predictive, stochastic and diagnostic'' (Hansen 1996, p. 138). Indeed, simulation models have been widely applied to balance, often conflicting, economic and environmental goals (Bergez et al 2010;Keating et al 2003Keating et al , 2010. Examples are the study of Murray-Prior et al (2005), who used cropping systems simulation to balance trade-offs between increasing profitability while improving soil fertility, and reducing runoff and subsoil drainage in diverse rotations, including wheat and cotton, and that of Muchow and Keating (1998), who identified irrigation guidelines that maximise sucrose yield whilst minimising water losses and groundwater tapping by simulating a sugar cane farming system.…”