Western societies are calling for speedy change in agriculture and the agrifood industries to incorporate new quality criteria into the goods they produce. To promote these changes what scientists must develop are not universally implementable technical solutions, but self-diagnosis methods to be used by agricultural producers and their advisors. They also need to evolve new procedures for research intervention in collective organisations. There is a need for new individual and collective learning and organisation processes based on transdisciplinarity and co-learning among researchers, development professionals, decision makers and farmers. In this book, scientists from ten industrialised countries describe and reflect on their theoretical and practical experience of the different forms of learning they experimented with.

Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Second Edition, Five Volume Set addresses important issues by examining topics of global agriculture and food systems that are key to understanding the challenges we face. Questions it addresses include: Will we be able to produce enough food to meet the increasing dietary needs and wants of the additional two billion people expected to inhabit our planet by 2050? Will we be able to meet the need for so much more food while simultaneously reducing adverse environmental effects of today’s agriculture practices? Will we be able to produce the additional food using less land and water than we use now? These are among the most important challenges that face our planet in the coming decades. The broad themes of food systems and people, agriculture and the environment, the science of agriculture, agricultural products, and agricultural production systems are covered in more than 200 separate chapters of this work. The book provides information that serves as the foundation for discussion of the food and environment challenges of the world. An international group of highly respected authors addresses these issues from a global perspective and provides the background, references, and linkages for further exploration of each of topics of this comprehensive work. Addresses important challenges of sustainability and efficiency from a global perspective. Takes a detailed look at the important issues affecting the agricultural and food industries today. Full colour throughout.

L'informatique agricole se caractérise aujourd'hui par une large gamme d'applications, mais peu d'entre elles répondent au besoin d’aide à la décision ressentie par leurs utilisateurs. L'intelligence artificielle et les systèmes experts ont tenté de pallier cette déficience, principalement dans le domaine du diagnostic qui est le point central de toute application d'aide à la décision. La représentation des connaissances sous forme de règles de production a permis une avancée technologique considérable dans le sens de l'approche déclarative des problèmes, mais a également présenté des limites et insuffisances qui ont rendu les systèmes experts peu opérationnels. Dès lors, plusieurs propositions sont faites pour une nouvelle génération de systèmes interactifs d'aide à la décision, parmi lesquelles un raisonnement profond basé sur les modèles, une interface utilisateur propice au cheminement heuristique lors de la réflexion, et une approche orientée objets, tant au niveau de la conception que de la réalisation. L'ensemble de ces propositions est illustré par la présentation de Rentagri, progiciel d'analyse de la rentabilité des exploitations agricoles.