At a time when food producers have to make significant changes to their businesses in order to survive, a review of benchmarking in agriculture and discussion of its future potential is critical. This book meets that need by providing an overview of existing benchmarking practices in agriculture and the food supply chain, and evaluating the potential of these practices to drive sustainable innovation in food and farming. Increasing pressures from commodity markets, corporate buyers, government and rising input prices (particularly fuel prices) are creating an environment in which farmers and their advisors are keen to make greater use of performance information for survival and growth. Where farmers are diversifying into alternative production methods, non-agricultural enterprises and on-farm production and sales, the greater the interest in a wider range of accounting tools for decision making. Lisa Jack and her contributors draw on a wide range of data and sources from Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the UK and Europe to provide critical evaluations of what might be considered 'state of the art' benchmarking practices at this time, including recent strategic developments such as the use of non-financial measures in balanced scorecards. The food and farming industry is unusual in that benchmarking takes place among large numbers of small, family-owned businesses working in a global industry. Not only, therefore, is this book important for those working in food supply chain businesses, but also for those involved in the general practice of benchmarking.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a better understanding of the concept and practice of entrepreneurship. This guide has been prepared for people who want to start a farm business for the first time and for farmers that want to make changes to their farming systems by introducing high value enterprises directed to the market. This guide can also help extension workers be better able to help farmers develop the skills and spirit of an entrepreneur. It is part of a series of booklets on farm business management designed to help extension workers support farmers.

This ground-breaking book sets out a comprehensive governance framework to raise the welfare of animals across EU agriculture and the agri-food chain. Diane Ryland argues that a global response is needed to promote animal wellbeing in agriculture, focusing on the importance of the relations between public and private standard-setting bodies.

The Canadian food and agriculture sector is for the most part competitive and export-oriented: although challenges and opportunities vary significantly between regions, primary agriculture benefits from an abundance of natural resources and faces limited environmental constraints.

This book comprehensively argues for more future benchmarking between nations. Since the initial food safety benchmarking report was published in 2008, the sharing of data and protocols among nations has dramatically increased. It was intended to identify and evaluate common elements among global food safety systems. More specifically, benchmarking identifies those countries that employ comparatively best practices to assess, manage, and communicate the risks related to the safety of food and their respective food systems. The overarching intent of this benchmarking assessment, however, is to stimulate exchange and discussion on food safety performance among nations.

With contributions from over 30 international legal scholars, this topical Research Handbook on International Food Law provides a crucial and reflective examination of the rules, power dynamics, legal doctrines, societal norms, and frameworks that govern the modern global food system. The Research Handbook analyses the interlinkages between producers and consumers of food, as well as the environmental effects of the global food network and the repercussions on human health.

Agricultural water management is a vital practice in ensuring reduction, and environmental protection. After decades of successfully expanding irrigation and improving productivity, farmers and managers face an emerging crisis in the form of poorly performing irrigation schemes, slow modernization, declining investment, constrained water availability, and environmental degradation. More and better investments in agricultural water are needed. In response, the World Bank, in conjunction with many partner agencies, has compiled a selection of good experiences that can guide practitioners in the design of quality investments in agricultural water. The messages of 'Shaping the Future of Water for Agriculture: A Sourcebook for Investment in Agricultural Water Management' center around the key challenges to agricultural water management, specifically: - Building policies and incentives - Designing institutional reforms - Investing in irrigation systems improvement and modernization - Investing in groundwater irrigation - Investing in drainage and water quality management - Investing in water management in rainfed agriculture - Investing in agricultural water management in multipurpose operations - Coping with extreme climatic conditions - Assessing the social, economic, and environmental impacts of agricultural water investments 'Shaping the Future of Water for Agriculture' is an important resource for those interested and engaged in development with a focus on agricultural water.

Many formal irrigation schemes are performing inefficiently for a number of reasons, among which the poor performance of irrigation institutions is one. Benchmarking may be defined as the identification and application of organisation specific best practices with the goal of improving competitiveness, performance and efficiency of such schemes. These guidelines are neither perfect nor final; rather, they represent the beginning of a long and exciting process of benchmarking in the irrigation and drainage sector.

To guide the design of future agriculture and food value chain interventions, this paper combines two existing spatial food and nutrition security typologies and applies them to the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Apart from estimating absolute and relative inefficiencies along the food system from agricultural potential to nutrition, the integration of both typologies resulted in nine unique low efficiency profiles across the territories and major cities of the Greater Kivu region and Tanganyika. In addition to low utilization efficiency observed in some areas, most PICAGL intervention zones, especially Uvira and Kalemie, suffer from significant market constraints and therefore could substantially benefit from food value chain development. Although this paper relies on the most recent and spatially disaggregated data (which is a major improvement with respect to agricultural statistics of the country), the proposed typologies cannot uncover all bottlenecks hindering the development of agricultural value chains in the region.