Marta Debolini

Farming systems designing landscapes: land management units at the interface between agronomy and geography

Agriculture faces big challenges, such as feeding a growing population and providing an increasing amount of biomass for energy production. Land is, however, a limited resource and intensification of agricultural practices is deprecated because of the negative impacts on natural resources. Effective answers should therefore be fostered by the development of smarter spatial configurations of agricultural activities. The improvement of farming systems therefore requires agronomy to interact with geography and other disciplines that deal with spatially-explicit aspects of agricultural land management. Different research approaches have supported agronomy in the development of a landscape approach and in this paper we focus on the interactions with geography fostering the enhancement of a common language about the way farming practices are observed and understood by the two disciplines. For this purpose, we compare land management units, identified in recent agronomic literature, with the aim to facilitate future synergies of landscape-oriented research about farming system design. We conclude by arguing for the enhancement of the interface between agronomy and geography and discussing some perspectives on the use of the various land management units in the design of future farming systems with a landscape approach.

The Territory Agronomy Approach in research, education and training

Landscape and territory agronomy analyses the two-way relationship between farming practices and land patterns. It takes into account both agro-environmental and socio-economic processes. A conceptual framework is presented to facilitate understanding of the complex interactions between the disciplines that contribute to this new field of research. We discuss the organisational issues that arise at various spatial and temporal scales during the development of territory-based case studies and research projects. The territory agronomy approach is a participatory action science. Building on our experiences, we propose a conceptual research-education-action platform for land management and territorial development. It demonstrates that the Territory Agronomy Approach is an iterative process where researchers, teachers, trainers and stakeholders develop new questions and methods through participation. These characteristics make the territory agronomy approach adapted to promote the territorial dimension in research, education and training activities on farming systems.