I picked this paper because I am interested on the topic of scaling non-conventional agricultural approaches and the challenges it might face in practice.
It is a review of existing research papers on the topic of agroecology and the different scales it requires to be successfully implemented or analyzed.
The first part "biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes as a foundation for agroecology" reminds the necessity to take into account different scales for conservation of species diversity: farm, field and landscape.
The drivers for biodiversity detailed here are space heterogeneity (composition (increase crop heterogeneity) and configuration of the landscape (reduce mean field size and increase semi-natural vegetation between fields)) and time heterogeneity (agricultural landscapes are dynamic in time (years, decades, centuries) so we need to consider legacy effects on the land as well). For the authors, based on the existing research, coordination of "wildlife friendly" practices at farm level and farmers collaboration appears to be a challenge that would require to involve social sciences.
In the second part of the article, the authors review the role of semi-natural habitats in agroecology for biological pest control and crop pollinisation. They point out that a large part of the crop production and thus food security rely on crop pollinisation.
In a third part, agroforestry is taken as an example of an interesting agroecological approach and an alternative to conventional agriculture. The challenge here being to identify the adequate regions for agroforestry taking into consideration "geomorphological farming type characteristics, socio-economical features, and context-specific conditions".
Individual farmers are limited in their action as they can be in the same landscape as farmers not taking an agroecological approach. To avoid this, in the last part, the article proposes guidelines for "agroecology landscape in practice" to enable this collaboration between farms, "unlock the lock of conventional agriculture", experiment and measure results at a larger scale.