About this book
Sustainable agriculture is a rapidly growing field aiming at producing food and energy in a sustainable way for humans and their children. Sustainable agriculture is a discipline that addresses current issues such as climate change, increasing food and fuel prices, poor-nation starvation, rich-nation obesity, water pollution, soil erosion, fertility loss, pest control, and biodiversity depletion.
Novel, environmentally-friendly solutions are proposed based on integrated knowledge from sciences as diverse as agronomy, soil science, molecular biology, chemistry, toxicology, ecology, economy, and social sciences. Indeed, sustainable agriculture decipher mechanisms of processes that occur from the molecular level to the farming system to the global level at time scales ranging from seconds to centuries. For that, scientists use the system approach that involves studying components and interactions of a whole system to address scientific, economic and social issues.
In that respect, sustainable agriculture is not a classical, narrow science. Instead of solving problems using the classical painkiller approach that treats only negative impacts, sustainable agriculture treats problem sources. Because most actual society issues are now intertwined, global, and fast-developing, sustainable agriculture will bring solutions to build a safer world. This book series gathers review articles that analyze current agricultural issues and knowledge, then propose alternative solutions.
Contents
1. Society issues, painkiller solutions, dependence and sustainable agriculture; Eric Lichtfouse2. Sociology of sustainable agriculture; Ezatollah Karami3. Sustainable versus organic agriculture; Vito Sardo4. Organic agriculture and food production: ecological, environmental, food safety and nutritional quality issues; Reza Ghorbani5. Sustainability of energy crop cultivation in Central Europe; Volkhard Scholz6. Phosphorus, plant biodiversity and climate change; Nicole Wrage7. Co-evolution and migration of bean and rhizobia in Europe; Paula A. Rodino8. Non-isotopic and 13C isotopic approaches to calculate soil organic carbon maintenance requirement; David Clay9. Soil solarization and sustainable agriculture; Trifone D'Addabbo10. Soil functions and diversity in organic and conventional farming; Supradip Saha11. Indigenous soil knowledge for sustainable agriculture; Iin P. Handayani12. Composting to recycle biowaste; Gyorgy Fuleky13. Nematodes as biocontrol agents; Tarique Hassan Askary14. Allelopathy and organic farming; Jana Kalinova15. Occurrence and physiology of zearalenone as a new plant hormone; Jolanta Biesaga-Kocielniak16. Homestead agroforestry, a potential resource in Bangladesh; Giashuddin Miah
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Biography
Dr. ERIC LICHTFOUSE, born April 2, 1960, completed his Ph.D. in organic geochemistry in 1989 at Strasbourg University. After post-doctoral fellowships at Indiana University, USA and the KFA research center in Julich, Germany, he became engaged as a soil scientist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) in 1992. His study on soil organic matter and pollutants led in particular to the first determination of the dynamics of soil organic molecules in long-term maize field experiments using 13C labeling at natural abundance. In 2000 he founded the European Association of Environmental Chemistry (ACE) and in 2003 the Journal Environmental Chemistry Letters. He has co-edited the book Environmental Chemistry (Springer, 2005). He is currently working in Dijon for the INRA Department of Environment and Agronomy as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development. He is growing fruit trees and vegetables in his home backyard and travelling from home to work by bicycle. Eric Lichtfouse is also finisher of 10 ironman competitions, including the World Ironman Championships in Hawaii in 2006.
