#152 of 152 articles from the Special Report:
Food Insider
Smaller farms produce more food per acre, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia. Photo courtesy of Pexels / Wendy Wei
Smaller farms produce more food and have more biodiversity than their larger counterparts, a new study has found.
With about a third of the world s food coming from farms two hectares in size or smaller, the findings point to a need for better global policies to support smaller, more diversified farms, say the researchers behind the University of British Columbia (UBC) analysis.
Lead author Vincent Ricciardi worked with his team to analyze 118 studies from the past 50 years, looking at 51 countries and their farming outputs. Biodiversity on a farm means a variety of plants and animals existing on the land, including the field edges that can house rabbits, bees, insects and other organisms. Crop biodiversity, which small farms also have more of, is the variation of what an ope
Green rice fields in Bali, Indonesia
Large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors, intended to improve global food security, had little to no benefit, increasing crop production in some areas while simultaneously threatening local food security in others, according to researchers who studied their effects.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by the University of Notre Dame, combined satellite imagery with agricultural surveys as well as household dietary datasets of 160 large-scale land acquisitions across four continents between 2005 and 2015. It is the first comprehensive global analysis of the impact of the land acquisitions of its kind.
Large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors, intended to improve global food security, had little to no benefit, increasing crop production in some areas while simultaneously threatening local food security in others, according to Notre Dame researchers who studied their effects.