In the context of climate change, pollution and food safety, the current challenge is to enhance legumes production to sustain the growing population needs by 2050. This is a daunting task because abiotic and biotic stresses are threatening the growth, survival and productivity of legumes. For instance, the productivity of legumes is documented to be reduced by 14-88% by abiotic stresses. The co-occurrence of abiotic and biotic stresses under field conditions leads to interactive stress types, thus yielding positive or negative outcomes. Legumes react using antioxidant defense, osmoregulatory adjustments, hormonal regulations and molecular mechanisms to tolerate stress. Hence, improving legume productivity requires knowledge on the sensitivity, mechanisms and approaches of stress tolerance in legumes, in order to design new crops and alternative management systems. This book presents advances on bioactive compounds, applications, effect of various stresses and biotechnology-based stress tolerance mechanisms of legumes. This is our second volume on Legume Agriculture and Biotechnology, published in the series Sustainable Agriculture Reviews.

In the last 20 years, there has been a remarkable emergence of innovations and technological advances that are generating promising changes and opportunities for sustainable agriculture, yet at the same time the agricultural sector worldwide faces numerous daunting challenges. Not only is the agricultural sector expected to produce adequate food, fiber, and feed, and contribute to biofuels to meet the needs of a rising global population, it is expected to do so under increasingly scarce natural resources and climate change. Growing awareness of the unintended impacts associated with some agricultural production practices has led to heightened societal expectations for improved environmental, community, labor, and animal welfare standards in agriculture. Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century assesses the scientific evidence for the strengths and weaknesses of different production, marketing, and policy approaches for improving and reducing the costs and unintended consequences of agricultural production. It discusses the principles underlying farming systems and practices that could improve the sustainability. It also explores how those lessons learned could be applied to agriculture in different regional and international settings, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa. By focusing on a systems approach to improving the sustainability of U.S. agriculture, this book can have a profound impact on the development and implementation of sustainable farming systems. Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems in the 21st Century serves as a valuable resource for policy makers, farmers, experts in food production and agribusiness, and federal regulatory agencies.

This book presents advanced knowledge and techniques to improve food quality, such as organic farming, fertilization using waste, reducing arsenic in food, soil restoration, forage production in arid regions and weed control. Agriculture is actually facing two major challenges, feeding an ever-growing population and providing safe food in the context of pollution, climate change and the future circular economy.

This book reviews recent research advances in sustainable agriculture, with focus on crop production, biodiversity and biofuels in Africa and Asia.

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 solutions are proposed based on integrated knowledge from sciences as diverse as agronomy, soil science, molecular biology, chemistry, toxicology, ecology, economy, philosophy and social sciences. Because 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. It will therefore help all scientists, decision-makers, professors, farmers and politicians who wish to build a safe agriculture, energy and food system for future generations.

The originality of this book is to review and characterize the current body of scientific publications that describe the complete causal sequence from reorganization of agricultural production to land use changes (LUC) and the resulting environmental impacts. The chapters examine both the range of territorial reorganizations leading to LUC and the range of associated environmental impacts considered in the literature, including GHG emissions, atmospheric pollution, biodiversity impacts, water resources, and soil quality.

This book reviews recent research and applications, developments, research trends, methods and issues related to the applications of industrial hemp for fundamental research and technology.