China’s sustainable development goals and carbon neutrality targets cannot be achieved without revolutionary transitions of the agricultural sector. The rapid development of digital technologies is believed to play a huge role in this revolution. The ongoing prevention and control of COVID-19 has greatly boosted the penetration of digital technology services in all areas of society, and sustainable transformation driven by digital technologies and services is rapidly becoming an area of innovation and research. Studies have shown that the rapid advancement of digitalization is also accompanied by a series of new governance challenges and problems: (1) unclear strategic orientation and inadequate policy and regulatory responses; (2) various stakeholders have not formed a sustainable community of interest; (3) information explosion is accompanied by information fragmentation and digital divide between countries and populations within countries. Meanwhile, current research has focused more on the role of digital services in urban governance and industrial development and lacks systematic research on its role in sustainable agricultural and rural development. To address the realities faced by different stakeholders in the process of digital transformation of agriculture, this paper aims to propose an inclusive analytical framework based on the meta-governance theory to identify and analyze the demand, supply, actor networks, and incentives in the digital technology-and-services-driven sustainable agricultural transformation, starting from the goals and connotations of sustainable agricultural and rural transformation and the interactions among different stakeholders in governing information flows. This analytical framework is further applied to analyze the cases of China and the EU. Although China and the EU represent different development phases and policy contexts, the framework is valid for capturing the characteristics of information flows and actor networks along the flows. It is concluded that a common information platform based on the stakeholder network would benefit all stakeholders, help reach common framing of issues, and maintain a dynamic exchange of information. Depending on the country context, different types of stakeholders may play different roles in creating, supervising, and maintaining such platforms. Digital infrastructures/products as hardware and farmers digital capacity as ‘software’ are the two wings for digital sustainable transformation. Innovative incentives from different countries may inspire each other. In any case, farmers’ actual farming behavior changes should be an important criterion for evaluating the effects and effectiveness of digital transition governance.

Soil mulching is one of the common measures applied in organic agricultural production which could replace plastic films and protect the environment. In order to fully evaluate the effects of different straw mulching thicknesses on soil health, maize straw was mulched with the thicknesses of 0 cm (CK), 2 cm, 4 cm and 6 cm on soil surface to assess the effects on soil temperature (ST) and moisture (SM), soil pH, soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), C/N, soil aggregates and soil bulk density (SBD) in a temperate organic vineyard. We found that straw mulching had a significant regulating effect, with soil moisture being elevated with increasing mulching thickness by 5.8%, 9.0% and 11.1% compared with CK. The soil SOC content increased by 3.0%, 2.4% and 2.3%. Although soil pH and C/N significantly (p < 0.05) increased, they fluctuated with increasing mulch thickness. Straw mulching also increased the content of >2 mm soil particle size and elevated the mean weight diameter (MWD) and geometric mean diameter (GMD). The increasing mulching thickness prolonged the effect on the stability of soil aggregates. The 4 cm maize straw mulching thickness has the best effect for ecologically and environmentally managing warm-temperate organic vineyards so it may have a great application prospect on a global scale.

“Zero Waste City” (ZWC) is an urban development model that minimizes the environmental impact of solid waste at the city level and is a specific practice of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper aims to summarize the key points for realizing the construction of ZWC and the SDGs and make suggestions for promoting the construction of ZWC and forming a Chinese solution for the SDGs. It takes Foshan City, one of the second batch of ZWC pilot projects, as a case study, analyzes the relationship between the construction of ZWC and sustainable urban development from the relevance of the ZWC index system in Foshan City and the SDGs, and analyzes the foundation and problems of its ZWC construction in adjusting the industrial structure and improving the protection system. We find that the concept of the ZWC index system in Foshan City and the SDGs are consistent in the objectives of solid waste, resource utilization, management, sustainability, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. The construction of ZWC in Foshan City is built through two intertwined paths by (1) adjusting the industrial structure of solid waste generation areas such as industrial waste, domestic waste, agricultural solid waste, and hazardous waste and promoting the refinement of the whole industrial chain in these fields and (2) improving the institutional, technical, market, regulatory and other protection systems in the solid waste generation fields. This paper condenses the construction of ZWC in Foshan as a Chinese solution for SDGs, providing a practical example of sustainable transformation for other manufacturing cities, with implications for both China and other manufacturing-oriented cities.