Farming-as-a-Service (FAAS) for a Sustainable Agricultural Ecosystem in India

Agriculture being the prime means of livelihood, there is a basic need of re-inventing the farming best practices, combined with tech-driven innovations in this segment to ensure sustainability and eliminate poverty and hunger. In this chapter, the authors focus on introducing relevant technology-enabled services that will ensure economic sustainability, enhance food security through data-driven decision making by various stakeholders like farmers,agri-business and agri-tech start-ups, farmpreneurs, government, agronomists, and IT suppliers. The analyzed information will be used as a vantage by farmers to select precision farming practices to aid productivity to empower personnel to provide timely assistance and industries to implement real-time monitoring using sensors and devices. The chapter will help formulate concepts, methods, practices, benefits, and introducing several case scenarios to effectively propagate the service mode of farming that will imbibe pay-as-you go model ensuring cost optimization and operational ease.

Ecosystem Valuation of Agricultural Land Use Change

With the rapid pace of urbanization, land-use change is essential for economic and social progress; however, it does not come without costs. With such rapid urbanization, there comes pressure on the land and its resources, like that of food and timber production with a significant impact on the livelihood of millions of people. With the loss of agricultural land due to developmental activities, future agriculture would be very intensive. Therefore, it is likely with the existing pattern of allocating land uses for future development that we may lose the ecosystem services and highly productive agricultural lands. The value of these ecosystem services to agriculture is enormous and often underappreciated. The study focuses on identifying underlying causes of the land-use change, ecosystem services affected due to land-use change in peri-urban areas of Chandigarh using spatial mapping of affected ecosystem services and suggesting proposals for promoting agricultural ecosystem values using economically-informed policy instruments.

Chitosan in modern agriculture production

In the perspective of return to nature, using scientific and technical progress for improved living standards, people began to search for solutions to alleviate environmental pollution. Researchers intend to make clean, affordable products that are gentle yet effective. Chitosan derived from the exoskeleton of crustaceans, cuticles of insects, cell walls of fungi, and some algae are renowned for many decades to exhibit biotic properties, especially anti-microbial characteristics. Here we review each ingredient for sourcing organic chitosan, with clean raw materials that can make pure, rich, and powerful products working naturally. Our study elaborates advances and utilisation of chitosan for industrial control-release fertilisers by physical, chemical, and multifaceted formulations such as water-retaining super absorbent, polyacrylic acid, and resins. Plant growth-promoting properties of chitosan as a growth regulator, pest/disease resistance, signalling regulation, effect on nuclear deformation, and apoptosis. Chitosan can improve the plant defence mechanism by stimulating photochemistry and enzymes related to photosynthesis. Furthermore, electrophysiological modification induced by chitosan can practically enable it to be utilised as a herbicide. Chitosan has an excellent role in improving soil fertility and plant growth as well as plant growth promoters. It is concluded, chitosan can play a key role in modern agriculture production and could be a valuable source promoting agricultural ecosystem sustainability. Future suggestions will be based on current achievements and also notable gaps. In addition, chitosan has a huge contribution to reducing fertilisers pollution, managing agricultural pests and pathogens in modern-day agriculture.

Sugarcane Industrial Byproducts as Challenges to Environmental Safety and Their Remedies: A Review

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) is one of the major crops cultivated in tropical and sub-tropical countries, and the primary purpose is to obtain raw sugar. It is an important substance for sugar and alcohol production by both the sugar and beverage industries. During cane processing, various byproducts are obtained, namely sugarcane bagasse, bagasse ash, pressmud cake, sugarcane vinasse, and spent wash. There are many challenging problems in storage, and they cause great environmental pollution. This review discusses their properties by which they can be used for cleaner agricultural and environmental sustainability. Utilization of byproducts results in value-added soil properties and crop yield. Replacing chemical fertilization with these organic natured byproducts not only minimizes the surplus usage of chemical fertilizers but is also cost-effective and an eco-friendly approach. The drawbacks of the long-term application of these byproducts in the agricultural ecosystem are not well documented. We conclude that the agriculture sector can dispose of sugar industry byproducts, but proper systematic disposal is needed. The need arises to arrange some seminars, meetings, and training to make the farming community aware of byproducts utilization and setting a friendly relationship between the farming community and industrialists.

Multidecadal, Continent-level Analysis Found No Impact of Climate Warming on Wheat Aphids

Temperature drastically determines insect abundances, thus under climate change, identifying major drivers affecting pest insect populations is critical to world food security and agricultural ecosystem health. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis with data obtained from 120 studies across China and Europe from 1970 to 2017 to reveal the roles of climate and agricultural practices in determining populations of wheat aphids. We showed aphid loads on wheat had distinct patterns between these two regions, with a significant increase in China but decrease in Europe over this time period. Although average winter and growing season temperatures increased over this period in both regions, we found no evidence showing climate warming affected aphid loads. Rather, differences in pesticide use, fertilization, land use, and natural enemies between China and Europe may be key factors accounting for differences in aphid pest populations. These findings provide insights for developing effective agroecosystem management under global change. These long-term data suggest that climate change may not be the most important driver of agricultural pest loads. Therefore, under global environmental change, consideration of multiple factors at large spatial-temporal scales will likely provide more insights for developing effective agroecosystem management to safeguard world food security.

Fintech and crowdfunding as tools for financing the reproduction process in agricultural activities

Agriculture plays an important role in the food security and sustainability of people in any country. The sustainability of agriculture can be improved by allowing the introduction of innovative services, such as financial technology (FinTech) and the digital marketplace. A digital trading platform supported by financial technology can transform business processes in agriculture into more sustainable ones in terms of financing and distribution. FinTech offers farmers easy ways to obtain funding sources through crowdfunding and digital payment systems. A digital trading platform can act as a platform for FinTech to integrate an innovative financial solution into the broader agricultural ecosystem. The article proposes a digital marketplace model using FinTech and a crowdfunding and payment system to support agricultural sustainability. The crowdfunding digital marketplace model brings together all participants (farmers, landowners, investors and consumers) in a platform that can promote transparency, empowerment, resourcefulness and public participation in agriculture.

Hotspots of Agricultural Ecosystem Services and Farmland Biodiversity Overlap with Areas at Risk of Land Abandonment in Japan

Agriculture provides a wide range of ecosystem services and has the potential to contribute to biodiversity conservation. In Japan, many of the resources associated with agroecosystems are threatened by farmland abandonment. Identifying where and to what extent agricultural ecosystem services and farmland biodiversity are affected by farmland abandonment is essential for developing effective strategies to counter the potential loss of these services and the biological communities that support them. Our study aimed to examine how a set of indicators for ecosystem services and biodiversity linked to agroecosystems (proportions of land dedicated to rice production and other agricultural production, proportion of agricultural land on slopes potentially providing landscape aesthetics, proportion of villages promoting rural tourism, and densities of forest edges and irrigation ponds in agricultural land) are distributed at the municipal level across the Japanese Archipelago, and to analyze their spatial patterns in relation to the distribution of farmland abandonment. It was hypothesized that hotspots of agricultural ecosystem services and farmland biodiversity occur in areas at risk of farmland abandonment owing to shared drivers. The cluster analysis identified four distinct ecosystem service bundle types, two of them representing areas specializing in agricultural production, while the other two provided high levels of cultural services and habitats for diverse biological communities. The latter two bundles were located in hilly and mountainous areas and accounted for 58% of rice production, 27% of other agricultural production, 77% of landscape aesthetics, 77% of rural tourism, 64% of forest edges, and 87% of irrigation ponds in Japan. In support of the hypothesis, farmland abandonment was pronounced in these areas, with 64% of recently abandoned fields located where 44% of agricultural land was found. This spatial overlap suggests that substantial losses of ecosystem services and biodiversity may occur if current patterns of farmland abandonment continue. In order to prevent large-scale losses of agricultural ecosystem services and farmland biodiversity, measures to counteract the ongoing abandonment trends should prioritize hilly and mountainous areas, and future studies should further evaluate the multiple functions of agricultural areas to improve policies that aim to ensure sustainable development of rural areas in Japan.

Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungal Diversity In Medicinal Plants Of Sirumalai Hills, Eastern Ghats And Their Role In Melia Dubia Cav

The microbial World is the largest unexplored reservoir of biodiversity on earth. Interest in the exploration of microbial diversity has been promoted by the fact that a microbe performs numerous functions essential for the biosphere that include nutrient cycle and environmental detoxification. Notably, under natural circumstances, plants frequently interact with microbes,which directly arbitrate plant responses to environmental adversities. Some microbe-plant interactions lead to a mitigation of stress-related damages and improvement of plant tolerance to stressful conditions. As a crucial element of soils, microbes are an integral part of the agricultural ecosystem.