For African agricultural productivity to improve, governments and donors must invest in programs and policies that will improve the incentives and capacity of farmers to make investments that increase farm productivity and soil fertility while protecting the environment. With rapid population...

Environmental effects of animal waste have long been a concern to the United States livestock industry. Ever increasing livestock production scale, has resulted in three crucial environmental and odor consequences: 1. Spills from animal waste stores; 2. Nutrient runoff due to the application of...

Sustainable agricultural research and education have gained acceptability within the land-grant system in less than a decade, an impressive change. Attitudes were changed by a set of forces which include lobbying by sustainable agriculture advocates, requests from farmers as a result of the...

The Multi Agent-Based Environmental Landscape model (MABEL) introduces a Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) systemic methodology, to simulate land use and transformation changes over time and space. Computational agents represent abstract relations among geographic, environmental, human...

As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract...

Many business firms both in the U.S. and abroad are practicing corporate environmental management. They are committed to improving the efficiency of material use, energy use and water use; to recycle; to make safer products and processes and to reduce their overall impact on the environment. In...

Links between poverty and natural resource degradation are examined in the context of soil erosion, fertility loss and overgrazing in the Peruvian Altiplano. Multiple regression analysis of 1999 farm survey data examines 1) what agricultural practices affect natural resource degradation, and...

Industrial waste reduction provides an opportunity to improve environmental quality while reducing industrial costs. Significant evidence exists that firms can realize economic benefits while practicing waste reduction techniques, yet opportunities are being missed by firms due to internal...

Hazardous wastes such as spent solvents and heavy-metal paint waste are characterized by certain adverse properties which include toxicity, reactivity, corrosivity, and flammability. Improper disposal of hazardous wastes may lead to air pollution, water pollution, or soil contamination which are...

Waste generation is a natural and expected outcome of productive activity. Waste is produced, much like any other commodity, although rather than considering waster as a "good" where more is preferred to less, we would tend to consider waste as a 'bad' - less is preferred to more. However, it is...