Agriculture has seen many revolutions, whether the domestication of animals and plants a few thousand years ago, the systematic use of crop rotations and other improvements in farming practice a few hundred years ago, or the “green revolution” with systematic breeding and the widespread use of man-made fertilizers and pesticides a few decades ago. We suggest that agriculture is undergoing a fourth revolution triggered by the exponentially increasing use of information and communication technology (ICT) in agriculture. New technologies, such as unmanned aerial vehicles with powerful, lightweight cameras, allow for improved farm management advice. Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Kleir. Autonomous, robotic vehicles have been developed for farming purposes, such as mechanical weeding, application of fertilizer, or harvesting of fruits. The development of unmanned aerial vehicles with autonomous flight control (1), together with the development of lightweight and powerful hyperspectral snapshot cameras that can be used to calculate biomass development and fertilization status of crops (2, 3), opens the field for sophisticated farm management advice. Moreover, decision-tree models are available now that allow farmers to differentiate between plant diseases based on optical information (4). Virtual fence technologies (5) allow cattle herd management based on remote-sensing signals and sensors or actuators attached to the livestock. Taken together, these technical improvements constitute a technical revolution that will generate disruptive changes in agricultural practices. This trend holds for farming not only in developed countries but also in developing countries, where deployments in ICT (e.g., use of mobile phones, access to the Internet) are being adopted at a rapid pace and could become the game-changers in the future (e.g., in the form of seasonal drought forecasts, climate-smart agriculture). Such profound changes in practice come not only with opportunities but also big challenges. It is crucial to point them out at an early stage of this …

Agri‐environmental schemes (AESs) are increasingly implemented to promote the adoption of environmentally friendly practices by farmers. We use a systematic review to explore the role of behavioural factors and opportunity costs in farmers' decisions to participate in AESs in Australia, Europe and North America. Behavioural factors influence how farmers value and perceive options, while opportunity costs relate to farmers' forgone utility when choosing to participate in schemes. We synthesise insights from 79 articles and over 700 factors explaining the participation in AESs. We find that a set of behavioural factors seem consistently connected to participation, including agricultural training, advice and having positive attitudes towards AESs. Moreover, several factors related to opportunity costs also have a rather consistent relationship with AES participation, including market conditions, implementation efforts, profitability, and management and contract flexibility. However, many relationships of behavioural factors and opportunity costs with AES participation are not as consistent and generalizable as sometimes portrayed and require context‐specific interpretation. Those factors with mixed results can still provide insights into farmers' participation decisions as several of them are either ‘positively and insignificantly’ or ‘negatively and insignificantly’ related to participation, such as environmental attitude, trust and farm size. These results suggest that their relationship with AES participation depends on other factors or the setting, highlighting interactions and raising important new research questions. Overall, our results provide several entry points for both researchers and policy‐makers, highlighting uncertainties in relationships between factors and participation that should be considered when designing policies.

Briner, S., R. Huber, P. Bebi, C. Elkin, D. R. Schmatz, and A. Grêt-Regamey. 2013. Trade-offs between ecosystem services in a mountain region. Ecology and Society 18(3): 35.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-05576-180335