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Soil-water practice is essential for farm sustainability, thereby establishing the reference level for agricultural policy of the European Union (EU). This paper focuses on the critical gap in the knowledge surrounding comparison of soil-water effects of Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC) and carbon farming. We aim to interrogate the tasks assigned to soil-water standards during the 2005–2020 timeframe and identify soil-water effects under selected soil-water GAEC topics. The farm-level and landscape-scale effects were weighed for each standard. The investigation included an extensive meta-review of documents that featured scientific work on sustainable practice. In each GAEC document, soil-water sustainability was weighed vis-a-vis carbon farming. Our main finding was that the identification of soil-water effects within GAEC was addressed both at farm-enterprise level (E) and landscape scale (L). This identification was very similar among the sampled Member States (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). A small differentiation was detected in how exact the guidance under each standard was in each of these Member States, and hence how the prioritization was scored, ranging from 1, most influential, to 5, least influential. The scores that prevailed were 2.5–5 on the part of the scoring instrument. Carbon farming is a welcome addition to the corpus of good farming practice and is complementary to GAEC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, we can see a rapid decline of agricultural land with new uses, especially for construction purposes. This negative trend is evident across Europe, the Czech Republic has the fastest loss of land in the EU. One reason for the significant loss of agricultural land is building industrial zones, which utilises of greenfield areas, and their occupying new areas of agricultural land, often the most the most fertile. The analysis deals with the occupied area (the area of a particular industrial zone), the percentage utilisation of that industrial zone, the number of employees in the industrial zone, and the land quality expressed by means of the agricultural land protection class. The results of the analysis show the low usability of industrial zones, the large occupation of the agricultural land, and the low benefits to the Czech state and Czech citizens. The results also show the poor land use policy in relation to the soil protection. This work is followed by the project Sustainable management of natural resources with an emphasis on non-production and production ability of the soil, the results of which will be included in legislation and be binding for spatial planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]