As a pathway to environmental sustainability, several approaches to sustainable agriculture practices have consistently been echoed through international government agencies such as the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations Development Programme. Given this perspective, this study examines the carbon emission effects of the categories of agricultural land utilization (this includes arable land, permanent cropland, meadows land, and forest land) for Turkey over the period 1988-2019. The study further explores the dimension of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emission from agricultural land use for sown crops, fruits and beverages, vineyards, and olives, in addition to the effect of economic expansion. By employing the autoregressive distributed lag empirical approach, the study finds that the use of agricultural land for arable farming and permanent plantation helps to reduce carbon emissions, especially in the long-run, while the impact of meadows is also desirable only in the short-run. Consequently, the study further shows that the use of farmland for fruits and beverages, and vineyard mitigates carbon emission, especially in the long-run. Whereas the use of farmland for olives plantation and fallow exhibits a significant contribution of carbon emission, especially in the short-run with elasticities of 0.91 and 1.48 respectively. Moreover, economic expansion in Turkey causes significant harm to environmental quality in the long-run thereby truncating its short-run desirable environmental effect. In order to sustain the largely efficient agricultural practice in Turkey, the study offers two policy dimensions to the government and the country's stakeholders in the agricultural sector. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2022;18:988-996. © 2021 SETAC.