Modern practices of industrial farming, such as mineral fertilization, caused a widespread degradation of agricultural land and water bodies in Europe. Different farm management strategies exist to reduce the impact of mineral fertilization while preserving soil productivity. The aim of this paper is to provide a thorough systemic review of contemporary literature exploring factors and conditions affecting EU farmers’ adoption of sustainable farming practices. The specific focus is on widely adopted and empirically explored measures, such as organic farming, manure treatment technologies and manure fertilization, as well as soil and water conservation methods. In total, 23 peer-reviewed studies were extracted by means of Google Scholar covering the time period between 2003 and 2019. The main findings show that farmers’ environmental and economic attitudes in addition to their sources of information have a strong effect on the adoption of organic farming, although there is a lack of evidence of their impact on adopting manure treatment and conservation measures. Similarly, farmers’ age and education are found to systemically influence organic farming adoption, but not adoption of other reviewed technologies. While other factors, such as farm physical characteristics or technological attributes, may be important determinants of adoption, it is hard to recognize definite patterns of their impact across technologies given a shortage of empirical evidence. More research utilizing standardized surveys and methods of analysis is needed to formulate qualified guidelines and recommendations for policymakers.

The European Union’s (EU) Farm to Fork strategy seeks to reduce agricultural pesticide use by 50%, both of total pesticide use and of the most hazardous chemicals. While Ireland has achieved the goal of overall pesticide use reduction, more progress is needed regarding more hazardous substances. Ireland’s cool damp climate is unique within the EU, and with little empirical data on the possible impacts of achieving this goal on Irish farming, we sought to estimate these in cereal crops using a ‘Delphi’ style iterative expert panel methodology, conducted over two rounds, rather than until consensus was reached, to allow for knowledge gaps that may exist to become apparent. A total of 17 crop production experts with at least five years of relevant experience were surveyed anonymously, and then their answers were compiled and fed back to them, allowing participants to revise their responses based on the opinion of the group. Participants estimated that reduced use of more hazardous fungicides and insecticides could both reduce yields by 10–15%, while reduced use of herbicides would reduce yields of winter cereals by up to 30%. These impacts are substantially higher than those predicted in other Europe-wide studies. Application of additional Integrated Pest Management measures was estimated to reduce yield loss but not entirely mitigate it. These findings highlight the economic and food security trade-offs that may be required to achieve the Farm to Fork strategy’s goals.

Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a well-established framework for agricultural crop protection. IPM has typically been represented as a pyramid of practices, beginning at the base with agronomic and cultural approaches and gravitating upwards towards chemical plant protection products. However, this representation is an insufficient description of IPM adoption at the farm level as it cannot incorporate the many challenges faced by farmers and growers. This paper presents an alternative approach to contextualize horticultural IPM based on a sample of commercial vegetable and fruit growers from the Republic of Ireland (N = 45), based on an existing model. This model incorporates the management, business, and sustainability aspects influencing IPM adoption. Utilization of the model on data collected from growers through a series of semi-structured interviews contributed to a. a comprehensive exploration of the type of IPM tools being used and b. contextualized analysis of the data with the intention of capturing grower perspectives. The findings highlight a crop and production system effect on the type of IPM tools used by the growers and suggest influence from a range of internal and external motivating and limiting factors. Excerpts from the grower interviews underline the complexity of IPM and draw attention to the lack of grower-centricity captured by IPM paradigms heretofore.