Scientists Map 25 Years of Sustainability Research in Farming Education

A sweeping new analysis of nearly 1,500 scientific publications has revealed how the education of farmers, horticulturists and agricultural professionals has quietly transformed over a quarter of a century, shifting from narrow technical instruction to a sprawling, interdisciplinary enterprise at the heart of the global sustainability transition. The study, published in the journal Discover Education, applied bibliometric mapping to 1,476 documents indexed in the Scopus database between 2000 and 2024, tracing the intellectual structure of agriculture and horticulture education through citation networks, co-authorship patterns and keyword co-occurrence analysis. The picture that emerges is striking: a field that once revolved around production techniques and vocational skills has become a central battleground for climate adaptation, environmental stewardship and pro-environmental behaviour change.

The research team, led by Mallika Roy and Bablo Biswas, began with a broad Boolean search combining the terms ‘Horticulture’ or ‘Agriculture’ with ‘Education’ or ‘Training’, which initially retrieved 28,739 records. After filtering for English-language articles, reviews, book chapters, books and short surveys across subject areas including social sciences, agricultural and biological sciences, and environmental science, the final dataset settled at 1,476 publications. The authors then used the network visualisation software VOSviewer to construct maps of how publications, authors, countries and keywords relate to one another, complementing these quantitative networks with a qualitative thematic synthesis of the most highly cited studies.

The temporal trends alone tell a compelling story. Publication activity remained low and stable between 2000 and 2013, with fewer than 40 papers appearing each year. From 2014 onwards, output accelerated markedly, and the most dramatic surge came after 2019, with annual publications climbing from 85 in 2019 to 154 in 2024, the highest figure recorded in the entire study period. The researchers attribute this trajectory to rising global attention to sustainability, climate change adaptation, digital agriculture and capacity building, suggesting that agricultural education has become a strategic instrument for meeting international policy commitments rather than a niche academic pursuit.

Geographically, the collaboration networks reveal both the strength and the unevenness of the field. Of 102 countries meeting the analysis threshold, 99 formed a single connected network divided into 14 clusters, linked by 598 connections. The United States dominated with 362 documents and the highest total link strength of 205, indicating extensive international collaboration, followed by the United Kingdom with 99 documents and a link strength of 147. India and China, despite producing 115 and 107 documents respectively, showed comparatively fewer links and lower link strengths of 61 and 59, pointing to limited international integration despite high research output. The authors caution that total link strength can be inflated by publication volume, but the pattern nonetheless suggests that research activity remains concentrated in developed economies, leaving developing-country perspectives underrepresented in a field where sustainability challenges are often most acute.

Keyword co-occurrence analysis proved to be the study’s most revealing technique. Among 599 keywords that appeared at least five times, the term ‘agriculture’ dominated with 419 occurrences and a total link strength of 5,500, followed closely by ‘education’ with 267 occurrences. The analysis identified five dominant thematic clusters: sustainability; climate change and adaptation; education and capacity building; farmers’ behaviour and technology adoption; and pesticides, food safety and agricultural policy. A thematic map classifying these clusters by centrality and density showed that sustainability, sustainable development, conservation and urban agriculture occupy the influential ‘motor themes’ quadrant, alongside climate change, adaptation, resilience and climate-smart agriculture. Education and training themselves sat in the ‘basic and transversal’ quadrant, foundational and highly connected but theoretically underdeveloped, while biodiversity, pollinators and ecosystem services formed a mature but relatively isolated niche.

Perhaps the most provocative finding concerns what is missing. Although pro-environmental behaviour was initially identified as a key conceptual outcome of agricultural education, the bibliometric results showed that explicit behavioural constructs were largely absent from the field’s dominant vocabulary. The authors argue that while environmental stewardship and sustainable practices are frequently discussed, the mechanisms through which educational interventions actually change decision-making among farmers and supply chain stakeholders remain underexplored. This gap matters because the study’s theoretical framework, built on four complementary perspectives from sustainability education, environmental education theory, experiential learning theory and eco-efficiency theory, positions behaviour change as the critical link between classroom and field, between knowledge acquisition and measurable sustainability outcomes.

The thematic synthesis of highly cited publications grounded these abstractions in concrete global challenges. Two of the seven selected studies focused on pesticide knowledge and safety, drawing on research in Kuwait and Sri Lanka that documented significant gaps in farmers’ understanding of safe handling practices and the public health burden of pesticide poisoning. Another examined the barriers to adopting integrated pest management in developing countries, where limited technical knowledge, inadequate training, financial constraints and weak institutional support impede the transition away from chemical dependency. A study of drought-prone and groundwater-depleted regions of Bangladesh demonstrated that farmers’ adaptive responses to climate variability depend heavily on access to knowledge, training and institutional support, reinforcing the case for climate-resilient agricultural education.

The remaining themes extended the field’s reach into economics and ecology. An assessment of farming eco-efficiency using data envelopment analysis highlighted how resource optimisation can raise productivity without compromising environmental integrity, while an analysis of structural transformation in the United States underscored how agricultural development is inseparable from broader economic and social change. A landmark study on pollinator declines brought biodiversity into the frame, warning that the loss of pollinating species threatens both ecosystem functioning and the stability of food crop yields. Together, the authors contend, these interconnected themes demonstrate that education functions as a common enabling mechanism across domains that have traditionally been studied in isolation, from occupational health to conservation biology.

The publication landscape itself reflects the field’s interdisciplinary character. Sustainability, published in Switzerland, led in output with 47 documents and 847 citations, while Science of the Total Environment achieved the highest citation impact with 1,056 citations from only 16 papers. The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, PLOS ONE and the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health also featured among the most productive outlets. In the co-citation network, the authors van der Hoek and Jallow emerged as the most influential figures, their work on pesticide poisoning and safety practices serving as foundational reference points that connect otherwise distinct research clusters, including studies of farmer safety behaviour in Nepal, Morocco and Pakistan.

Looking forward, the study proposes a conceptual framework and a set of research propositions linking education to knowledge development, pro-environmental behaviour and sustainability outcomes, while offering practical recommendations ranging from experiential learning through demonstration farms and farmer field schools to digital learning platforms, sustainability competency frameworks and stronger industry-university-government collaboration. The authors are careful to note the limitations of their approach: the analysis was restricted to Scopus and English-language publications, the deliberately broad search strategy may have captured studies in which education was only one component, and bibliometric patterns cannot establish causation. Yet the central message stands. As climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity intensify, the education of the people who grow the world’s food has evolved from a backwater of vocational training into a strategic frontier of sustainability science, and the evidence base for designing it well is only now beginning to take shape.

Subject of Research: Bibliometric mapping of sustainability-oriented agriculture and horticulture education research

Article Title: Mapping sustainability research, education and training in agriculture and horticulture

Article References: Roy, M., & Biswas, B. (2026). Mapping sustainability research, education and training in agriculture and horticulture. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1077. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02153-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02153-x

Keywords: agriculture, horticulture, sustainability, education, bibliometrics, climate change adaptation, pro-environmental behaviour, pesticide safety, biodiversity, capacity building, Scopus, VOSviewer