Abstract
Agriculture is the largest human enterprise on Earth and a major driver of terrestrial ecosystem change, making it one of the most urgent arenas for technological and policy innovation. This chapter examines the ecological foundations, principal practices, adoption barriers, and emerging technologies that define sustainable agriculture under conditions of climate change, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss. It reviews conservation tillage and soil-carbon management, precision agriculture and digital farming, agroforestry and intercropping, integrated pest management, climate-smart agriculture, and the roles of soil microbiomes and biostimulants. Structural constraints—including economic barriers, policy misalignment, knowledge gaps, and Green Revolution infrastructure—are considered alongside case studies from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asian smallholder systems. Emerging approaches include nano-enabled crop nutrition, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) farm management, gene-edited stress-tolerant crops, and synthetic-biology pathways for nitrogen fixation. The chapter links these developments with soil, water, biodiversity, agrochemical, and food-water-energy perspectives elsewhere in the volume, framing sustainable agriculture as a systems problem requiring coordinated scientific, technological, financial, and governance responses.