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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• landscape agronomy
• farming practices
• spatial issues
• European landscape convention
• territorial planning

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the constructive comments of two anonymous reviewers on the earlier version of this manuscript. We also warmly thank Anna Camilla Moonen for its first draft of the table 1, which has been an important input for our disciplinary analysis.