How to Promote the Agricultural Company Through Environmental Social Responsibility to Achieve Sustainable Production?

This survey employs the multilevel growth curve model to demonstrate how to promote the development of the company’s environmental innovation in agricultural companies specializing in the agricultural production and export of agricultural products to achieve sustainable production through environmental social responsibility and environmental engagement according to the engagement theory. The empirical data are collected 30 chief executive officers and their 90 supervisors of top management teams (TMTs) of Taiwanese agricultural companies in 2 months. The empirical results demonstrate that environmental social responsibility significantly influences the top management teams’ environmental engagement development, which in turn significantly influences the agricultural company’s environmental innovation. These empirical results can not only promote the sustainable production literature in the agricultural field but also help these agricultural companies implement environmental innovation to realize sustainable production of agricultural exports.

An Analysis of Research Trends in the Sustainability of Production Palnning

Sustainability has become of great interest in many fields, especially in production systems due to the continual increase in the scarcity of raw materials and environmental awareness. Recent literature has given significant attention to considering the three sustainability pillars (i.e., environmental, economic, and social sustainability) in solving production planning problems. Therefore, the present study conducts a review of the literature on sustainable production planning to analyze the relationships among different production planning problems (e.g., scheduling, lot sizing, aggregate planning, etc.) and the three sustainability pillars. In addition, we analyze the identified studies based on the indicators that define each pillar. The results show that the literature most frequently addresses production scheduling problems while it lacks studies on aggregate production planning problems that consider the sustainability pillars. In addition, there is a growing trend towards obtaining integrated solutions of different planning problems, e.g., combining production planning problems with maintenance planning or energy planning. Additionally, around 45% of the identified studies considered the integration of the economic and the environmental pillars in different production planning problems. In addition, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are the most frequent sustainability indicators considered in the literature, while less attention has been given to social indicators. Another issue is the low number of studies that have considered all three sustainability pillars simultaneously. The finidings highlight the need for more future research towards holistic sustainable production planning approaches.

Expression of phenylalanine ammonia lyases in Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 and subsequent improvements of sustainable production of phenylpropanoids

Background Phenylpropanoids represent a diverse class of industrially important secondary metabolites, synthesized in plants from phenylalanine and tyrosine. Cyanobacteria have a great potential for sustainable production of phenylpropanoids directly from CO2, due to their photosynthetic lifestyle with a fast growth compared to plants and the ease of generating genetically engineered strains. This study focuses on photosynthetic production of the starting compounds of the phenylpropanoid pathway, trans-cinnamic acid and p-coumaric acid, in the unicellular cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 (Synechocystis). Results A selected set of phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL) enzymes from different organisms was overexpressed in Synechocystis, and the productivities of the resulting strains compared. To further improve the titer of target compounds, we evaluated the use of stronger expression cassettes for increasing PAL protein levels, as well as knock-out of the laccase gene slr1573, as this was previously reported to prevent degradation of the target compounds in the cell. Finally, to investigate the effect of growth conditions on the production of trans-cinnamic and p-coumaric acids from Synechocystis, cultivation conditions promoting rapid, high density growth were tested. Comparing the different PALs, the highest specific titer was achieved for the strain AtC, expressing PAL from Arabidopsis thaliana. A subsequent increase of protein level did not improve the productivity. Production of target compounds in strains where the slr1573 laccase had been knocked out was found to be lower compared to strains with wild type background, and the Δslr1573 strains exhibited a strong phenotype of slower growth rate and lower pigment content. Application of a high-density cultivation system for the growth of production strains allowed reaching the highest total titers of trans-cinnamic and p-coumaric acids reported so far, at around 0.8 and 0.4 g L−1, respectively, after 4 days. Conclusions Production of trans-cinnamic acid, unlike that of p-coumaric acid, is not limited by the protein level of heterologously expressed PAL in Synechocystis. High density cultivation led to higher titres of both products, while knocking out slr1573 did not have a positive effect on production. This work contributes to capability of exploiting the primary metabolism of cyanobacteria for sustainable production of plant phenylpropanoids.

Initial social network analysis of producers working towards sustainability suggests weak ties and potential fragmentation

For farmers to adopt and maintain sustainable farming practices, they must have the resources and network to succeed with this work and must realize a positive impact on their business model. As a food system is ultimately made up of the people, organizations, and institutions that grow, move, buy and sell food, we must understand who is at the center of this network, who is well-connected, and who is peripheral. Within a particular regional food system in a highly productive southeastern U.S. state, the network of local producers interested in sustainable production, including environmental and economic components, seems to be growing. However, it is unclear who benefits from this system and whether this system is growing in a way that encourages and enhances the benefits for sustainable agriculture. Existing evidence for the network size and its vulnerabilities has been anecdotal, from Extension agents and their contacts with individual producers, rather than based on systematic research. We used social network analysis to understand the status of the system and its constituents. Connections between producers appear to be weak overall with potential fragmentation, suggesting a fragility that could easily derail efforts to increase sustainable production in the region.