Horticultural farms are faced with the problem of disposing of huge amounts of agricultural by-products whose management requires sustainable solutions. Composting means to recycle organic waste to make compost—a high agronomic value product—able to positively affect soil quality: A good occasion to switch definitively from a conventional agriculture to an organic one. Nevertheless, composting can have negative direct/indirect environmental impacts. The aim of this research was to assess the sustainability of a windrow composting system, able to treat agricultural green waste of different typology (“light” and “heavy” with dry matter below or above 10%, respectively). Environmental impacts, energy consumptions, and production costs of all composting stages were evaluated by Life Cycle Assessment. Results show that the production of 1 ton of compost caused CO₂eq emissions ranging from 199 to 250 kg and required between 1500 and 2000 MJ of energy; costs ranged between 98 and 162 euro, nevertheless lesser than the commercial green compost. The raw material typology affected significantly the composting process making compost based on “heavy” materials the most sustainable. These findings underline the need to spread this low technology process, easy to apply, especially in organic farms, and to promote the agronomic use of compost.

Around the world, medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) play a fundamental role in the economic, social, cultural, and ecological ambits of local communities. Today, the most important uses of MAPs are their applications in the pharmaceutical, perfume, cosmetics, toothpaste, soap, beverage, and food industries. At the same time, the expression MAPs is often used with a plurality of meanings that are not always clear and well-defined. Thus, the paper aims to answer two research questions: (1) to understand how the expression MAPs has been meant over time by scholars, and (2) to realize the weight that socio-economic research regarding MAPs has assumed in this context. To these ends, a literature review was conducted using the scientific database Scopus. The results highlight that researchers started talking explicitly about MAPs in the 1950s, and the geographical focus of the literature on this theme is in India, followed by China. Researchers have published studies concerning the agronomic aspects, cultivation, characterization, and germination techniques of MAPs, but the most cited articles concern the health and beneficial properties of their essential oils. At the same time, nobody has ever wondered what MAPs are, and since 1977, the World Health Organization definition has been taken for granted, and any species with medicinal or aromatic functions is considered to be a MAP. Regarding the socio-economic weight of the research conducted on MAPs, they represent only 1% of the total academic publications, but from them, it has emerged that, especially in rural areas, MAPs depict important sources of income for several local communities. At the same time, there is a need to increase the estimation of the ecosystem services that MAPs offer, the analyses of consumer preferences in the search for new business opportunities, and the environmental impact assessment of the entire supply chain.

Olive oil is a widely used consumer product, so producers and consumers are increasingly looking for sustainable productions. The olive-oil production chain requires continuous improvements to gradually replace the most environmentally impactful practices with others that are more sustainable. This research aimed to evaluate the environmental impacts of the production of olive oil in the Campania region by comparing six olive oil production systems (two organic certified, two integrated, and two organic—hobbyists). The environmental impacts for the production of one liter of oil—from field cultivation to oil distribution—were quantified by applying the life cycle assessment methodology. Impact categories were calculated according to the CML method, with particular attention paid to global warming potential. The production of one liter of oil caused CO₂eq emissions ranging from 0.22 to 3.39 kg. The least impacting cultivation method was the hobby one, which did not use pesticides and carried out organic fertilization. On average, packaging accounted for 60% of total impacts; consequently, the materials and formats choice by farms had strong effects on the environmental sustainability of oil production. This research highlights the problem of expressing sustainability judgments in agriculture, since there are no reference standards/targets that set limits beyond which agricultural productions are no longer sustainable.

The livestock sector plays a fundamental role in human beings’ livelihood all over the world. However, significant changes have occurred in the last decades, transforming the livestock sector into a highly intensive economic activity with negative impacts on human health and the environment. Such a reality requires the identification of easy methods to apply to sustainable manure management. Composting is a clever approach to transform manure into a resource. Very limited scientific literature is available on techniques for composting in small and medium livestock farms. This paper describes, in detail, some on-farm composting plants made in Southern Italy within different rural contexts. A depth analysis of farm starting situation and nearby territory (resources/services) was performed to identify the least expensive/impactful composting logistics (reduction of ex novo farm investments and transport costs, etc.), making the action economically sustainable for farmers. This approach appears to be successful in guiding farmers towards the best composting technological option, based on pre-existent on-farm resources. These small-scale composting plants, reproducible in other similar contexts, allow one to turn manure into a product with a profitable placement on the market. For this reason, these manure management options should be widespread, especially under organic farming systems.

Grasslands provide a wide range of provision, support, regulation, and cultural ecosystem services (ESs), whose valuation methods can be grouped into three categories (ecological, sociocultural, and economic). The present manuscript aims to provide an overview of academic studies on grassland ESs and of the most used economic evaluation methods. To this end, a systematic and bibliometric review was conducted using the scientific database Scopus and the VOSviewer software. The results highlighted that China and the USA were the main countries with the highest number of publications regarding ESs provided by grasslands. The number of publications began to grow starting in 2005, thanks, perhaps, to the publication of influential documents, such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the general increase in interest in ecological policy issues. The year 2023 had the highest number of documents in absolute (646), demonstrating the timeliness, importance, and relevance of this research topic. The most studied grassland ES has been carbon storage; however, a central role was played also by biodiversity. In this context, papers that estimated grassland ESs from an economic perspective represented only 3% of all papers that Scopus has returned. More than half of these referred to the use of equivalent coefficients to calculate the ES value of different land uses/land cover categories or, at most, of 11 types of ES. All this highlights the difficulty in estimating individual ESs provided by grasslands from an economic point of view and the greater propensity to use physical, chemical, and biological indicators. Consequently, the sustainable management of grasslands requires more studies on the economic evaluation of their ES, as well as environmental aspects in the economic accounting of governments, or to implement a support system for farms in delivering various ecosystem services.

This paper aims to provide an evaluation of the environmental and economic aspects of strawberry cultivation in the Campania and Basilicata regions of Southern Italy, and to consider the effects on strawberry productivity following compost tea (CT) application. Eight strawberry-growing systems were tested. To this end, compost tea production and characterization were described; a quantitative analysis of the strawberries’ yield was performed, and environmental impact per ha and per kg of strawberries was estimated using the life cycle assessment methodology. To compare the profitability of the systems analyzed, the gross profit of the farmers was calculated, also considering the social cost of pollution. One of the two organic systems analyzed, using solarization for soil disinfestation, biological fight for pest control, and corrugated boxes as packaging recycled at the end-of-life, was the most sustainable system with carbon credits. At the same time, organic crops are not always the most sustainable and profitable systems if significant irrigation and fertigation interventions are carried out, as in another organic system analyzed. Plastic materials and zinc structures were the most impacting items in almost all analyzed systems. The use of a CT with an elevated number of beneficial microorganisms with a high suppressive action allowed to obtain a good increase of the yield, in both systems that used it, and to have a higher gross profit. On the other hand, the validity of this technique was strongly linked to the finding of high-quality green compost.