Sustainable viticulture: how to evaluate and record it on a wine estate

Sustainable viticulture is being developed to meet the challenges of current societal expectations. Numerous assessment tools have emerged in recent years. The IDEA method (Indicateurs de Durabilité des Exploitations Agricoles or Farm Sustainability Indicators) is one of these assessment tools. Using the 4th version of IDEA (IDEA4), this article assesses the overall performance (level of sustainability) of a wine estate in Bordeaux in partnership with the company Ekylibre.

Regenerative Architecture: An Application of Regionalist Sustainability in New Zealand Dairy Farming Practice

<p>Over the past decade the New Zealand dairy industry has undergone unparalleled expansion in the agricultural sector. The influence of globalised market competition, beginning in 1985, has resulted in significant changes to the operation and scale of production of New Zealand farm conditions. With this, there have been a series of changes to the physical form of farming in New Zealand - most notably in a shift towards larger and more intensive practice. The term 'factory farming' has taken a unique and contextual evolution within these conditions, leading to questions of sustainability. Sustainability in this setting is often defined by production growth and trade conditions before more humanistic issues of social and ecological welfare. Similar to the competing perspectives of New Zealand dairy farm sustainability, the discipline of architecture faces a wide and complex field of approaches to sustainable practice. The views of researcher, Steven Moore, are focused on in this study with regard to the contested definitions of architectural sustainability. He advocates a regionalist approach in the belief that sustainability is better defined by local circumstance than a universal best approach. Moore's theory of non-modem regionalism and regenerative architecture are utilised in this thesis as a means of questioning the issues faced in New Zealand dairy farm sustainability. This study applies Moore's concept of a regenerative architecture in New Zealand dairy farming to cultivate improved social and ecological conditions. The architectural consequence of this discussion is in the form of a future mixed-use prototype for Canterbury dairy farming practice. This design explores the relationship between architecture, place and regionalist concepts of sustainability to improve the social and ecological attributes of this cultural setting. By taking a multidisciplinary approach to toward environmentally and socially sustainable dairy farming practices the design produces an integrated system that identifies with Moore's regenerative strategy. The study concludes that further architectural investigations into this setting could potentially influence and improve the future health and sustainability of the industry.</p>

Regenerative Architecture: An Application of Regionalist Sustainability in New Zealand Dairy Farming Practice

<p>Over the past decade the New Zealand dairy industry has undergone unparalleled expansion in the agricultural sector. The influence of globalised market competition, beginning in 1985, has resulted in significant changes to the operation and scale of production of New Zealand farm conditions. With this, there have been a series of changes to the physical form of farming in New Zealand - most notably in a shift towards larger and more intensive practice. The term 'factory farming' has taken a unique and contextual evolution within these conditions, leading to questions of sustainability. Sustainability in this setting is often defined by production growth and trade conditions before more humanistic issues of social and ecological welfare. Similar to the competing perspectives of New Zealand dairy farm sustainability, the discipline of architecture faces a wide and complex field of approaches to sustainable practice. The views of researcher, Steven Moore, are focused on in this study with regard to the contested definitions of architectural sustainability. He advocates a regionalist approach in the belief that sustainability is better defined by local circumstance than a universal best approach. Moore's theory of non-modem regionalism and regenerative architecture are utilised in this thesis as a means of questioning the issues faced in New Zealand dairy farm sustainability. This study applies Moore's concept of a regenerative architecture in New Zealand dairy farming to cultivate improved social and ecological conditions. The architectural consequence of this discussion is in the form of a future mixed-use prototype for Canterbury dairy farming practice. This design explores the relationship between architecture, place and regionalist concepts of sustainability to improve the social and ecological attributes of this cultural setting. By taking a multidisciplinary approach to toward environmentally and socially sustainable dairy farming practices the design produces an integrated system that identifies with Moore's regenerative strategy. The study concludes that further architectural investigations into this setting could potentially influence and improve the future health and sustainability of the industry.</p>

Anomaly Detection on Data Streams for Smart Agriculture

Smart agriculture technologies are effective instruments for increasing farm sustainability and production. They generate many spatial, temporal, and time-series data streams that, when analysed, can reveal several issues on farm productivity and efficiency. In this context, the detection of anomalies can help in the identification of observations that deviate from the norm. This paper proposes an adaptation of an ensemble anomaly detector called enhanced locally selective combination in parallel outlier ensembles (ELSCP). On this basis, we define an unsupervised data-driven methodology for smart-farming temporal data that is applied in two case studies. The first considers harvest data including combine-harvester Global Positioning System (GPS) traces. The second is dedicated to crop data where we study the link between crop state (damaged or not) and detected anomalies. Our experiments show that our methodology achieved interesting performance with Area Under the Curve of Precision-Recall (AUCPR) score of 0.972 in the combine-harvester dataset, which is 58.7% better than that of the second-best approach. In the crop dataset, our analysis showed that 30% of the detected anomalies could be directly linked to crop damage. Therefore, anomaly detection could be integrated in the decision process of farm operators to improve harvesting efficiency and crop health.

Learning for Sustainability in Horticultural Production in Arctic Norway

Sustainability learning is gaining popularity as an important field within sustainability research, where farm sustainability can be understood as a learning process. In this study, we seek to reveal the sustainability learning process of farmers, utilizing a framework distinguishing contextual factors (where? and when?), knowledge (what?), motivation (why?), and process (how?). The article presents a participatory inquiry mixed-methods approach, utilizing results from sustainability assessments on five farms with the SMART-farm tool as a unifying starting point for further discussions on sustainability learning in farmers' interviews and stakeholder workshops. Empirically the study is set in the horticultural production in Arctic Norway, where few studies on sustainability have been undertaken. The study shows how both the complexity of the concept of farm sustainability and contextual factors influence the sustainability learning process, for instance by giving rise to a vast number of conflicting issues while working toward farm sustainability. The sustainability learning process is found to be predominantly a social learning process. The theoretic contribution of the study lies in its novel framework that can be used to reveal important aspects of the sustainability learning process, as well as to contribute to the literature on how to proceed from sustainability assessments to implementation. A key finding from the study is that farmers will require continuous assistance in their processes toward farm sustainability, but for this to be possible, knowledge, sources of knowledge, and learning platforms for holistic sustainability need to be established.

EVALUATION OF THE SUSTAINABILITY OF GOAT FARMS IN THE NORTH-WESTERN REGION OF TUNISIA

Background: Sustainability issues are of particular importance for the goat sector in The North-southern of Tunisia, where many local populations are reared, ensuring livelihoods for vulnerable populations in rural areas, including those in marginal zones. Even though in recent decades there has been great progress in research aimed at increasing goat productivity, there is still great work to be done, namely in the sustainability of this sector Methods: The study aimed to assess the sustainability of goat farming in the North-West of Tunisia. Twenty farms practicing goat farming were involved. Sustainability was assessed using the IDEA method (Indicateurs de Durabilité des Exploitations Agricoles or Farm Sustainability Indicators). Results: The analysis of the three scales of sustainability (the agro-ecological scale, the socio-territorial scale, and the economic scale) permitted the identification of four classes of farmers in the agro-ecological scale, five classes on the socio-territorial scale, and five classes in the economic scale. The socio-territorial scale that had the lowest value (59.3 points/100) defined global sustainability. At this scale, the components, product territorial quality, ethics, and human development must be improved and optimized. While the highest performances are recorded by the economic scale (70.35), whose transmissibility indicator has the highest score (20 points). It was concluded that the most limiting factor of sustainability for all the farms is the socio-territorial scale, while the highest score of sustainability was found for the economic scale. Improvements should be implemented on all three scales.