Recent Advances in Technological and Agronomic Practices for Sustainable Agriculture

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable agriculture is a kind of agriculture that specializes in generating long-term plants and cattle at the same time as having minimum outcomes on the surroundings. This kind of agriculture tries to discover a top balance among the demand for food production and the preservation of the ecological gadgets inside the environment. In addition to generating meals, there are several general goals associated with sustainable agriculture, consisting of holding water, reducing the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and selling biodiversity in plants grown and the ecosystem. Sustainable agriculture additionally specializes in retaining the monetary balance of farms and assisting farmers with improving their techniques and satisfactoriness of existence.

Innovative technology and agronomic practices refer to specific practices used to improve soil fertility, crop diversification, and plant protection, promote crop growth, and increase productivity. A range of innovative technological development farming practices, approaches, and technologies exist that can increase output and productivity, supporting sustainability. At the farm level, several innovations related to improving production techniques are continuously evolving—for example, use of growth models to predict and estimate nutrient use efficiency, radiation use efficiency and water use efficiency, tillage practices that promote seed germination, priming techniques to improve seed germination and seedling growth, foliar application to improve plant growth, organic fertilization to support crop demands in nutrients, and growth regulators that improve crop growth under stress conditions, cover crop or crop rotation to increase crop diversity in the field.

Agricultural intensification increases crop productivity but simplifies production with a lower diversity of cropping systems, higher genetic uniformity, and a higher uniformity of agricultural landscapes. Associated detrimental effects on the environment and biodiversity as well as the resilience and adaptability of cropping systems to climate change are of growing concern. Crop diversification may stabilize the productivity of cropping systems and reduce the negative environmental impacts and loss of biodiversity, but a shared understanding of crop diversification, including approaches towards a more systematic research, is lacking.

For this Special Issue on ‘Recent Advances in Technological and Agronomic Practices for Sustainable Agriculture’, we are ready to accept papers that enhance our understanding of novel technologies and practices to improve crop production and discuss opportunities for maximizing agricultural productivity. Moreover, critical review and research articles are more than welcome to address the potential role of different techniques and practices to improve crop diversification and sustainable agriculture.

Dr. Mohsin Tanveer
Prof. Dr. Mirza Hasanuzzaman
Prof. Dr. Ejaz Ahmad Khan
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Agriculture is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.