This book explores how the sustainability of farming enterprises can be assessed, with a particular focus on the state of Bulgarian farms during EU CAP implementation and how such sustainability can be improved. It also investigates the evolution of the concept of sustainability. It analyses the economic, social and environmental sustainability of farming enterprises of different juridical types, sizes, specialization, and location. Factors and perspectives crucial in sustainable farming are identified, and directions for further research highlighted. The book will appeal to scientific researchers, teachers, students, farmers, professional and non-governmental organizations, administrators, and policy-makers.

A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.

What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's agriculture. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for enhanced resilience has become even more apparent and continues to be an overarching guiding principle of EU policy making. Resilience challenges and strategies are framed within four main processes affecting decision making in agriculture: risk management, farm demographics, governance and agricultural practices. This empirical focus looks at very diverse contexts, with eleven case studies from Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden. This study will help determine the future and sustainability of European farming systems. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book describes how to develop methods for evaluating and assessing the sustainable development of agricultural systems in a micro-region. A comprehensive and practical book, it guides the reader through details of the methodology needed to carry out an appropriate assessment, and focuses on the central problem of whether productivity can be maintained. More specifically, it: - Discusses the meanings of sustainability and sustainable development, and reviews the issues related to agricultural sustainability. - Examines the theory and practice of indicators and delineates the six categories considered necessary for a holistic evaluation: productivity, stability, efficiency, durability, compatibility and equity.

What are the impacts, both harmful and beneficial, of agriculture on the environment? And how do different policy measures affect the environment? This study outlines an analytical framework to further the analysis of agri-environmental linkages and sustainable agriculture.

This comparative history investigates rural communities in six east-Central Europe countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Most of them experienced in the 1990s the fourth radical restructuring of agricultural relations of the twentieth century, and, more challengingly, an historically unprecedented trajectory from socialism to capitalism. The author considers similarity and difference in the linked processes of breathing real democratic life into the structures of local democracy and recreating farming structures and non-agricultural businesses based on private ownership and private enterprise.

This volume is a ready reference on sustainable agriculture and reinforce the understanding for its utilization to develop environmentally sustainable and profitable food production systems. It describes ecological sustainability of farming systems, present innovations for improving efficiency in the use of resources for sustainable agriculture and propose technological options and new areas of research in this very important area of agriculture.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.

Sustainable Agroecosystem Management: Integrating Ecology, Economics, and Society examines the challenges for developing integrated approaches to the management of agricultural ecosystems. Providing historical background of attempts to bridge the ecological and agricultural sciences, this book highlights recent efforts to integrate natural and social science perspectives. Through various case studies with global applications, the text explores practical innovative strategies, policies, and research needs for emphasizing whole system productivity, diversification of agricultural operations, and management of agricultural systems that sustain multiple functions including ecological integrity.

This book examines the potential of Livestock Farming Systems (LFS) research to assess and understand the diversity of livestock farming systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). LFS research based on systemic modelling has improved the understanding of livestock production realities at farm level and influenced agricultural development strategies in Western Europe. Researchers from both Western and Eastern Europe carried out this initial study, which was coordinated and sponsored under a collaborative agreement between EAAP and FAO, and was run in selected regions in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic. The results and conclusions of the study are reported in the book, together with the other contributions of interest with respect to the sustainable development of livestock production in CEE presented and discussed during a workshop in Budapest in August 2001. The results of the study demonstrate the adaptability of LFS research to systems predominantly based on large-scale private, corporate and co-operative farms in the CEE countries.