The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed human vulnerabilities to infectious diseases across the world and has highlighted the need to better understand zoonotic pathogens spillover and transmission processes. Emergent infectious diseases with pandemic potential are becoming more common. Two thirds of emergent diseases are zoonotic and nearly three quarters of infectious zoonotic diseases originate in wildlife and spillover directly to humans, or indirectly via livestock. Anthropogenic land use changes have long been implicated in zoonotic diseases, with deforestation, fragmentation, and general conversion of forest to agriculture accelerating zoonotic spillover of pathogens from vertebrate animal hosts to humans by reducing biodiversity, while simultaneously increasing reservoir population abundance and their contact with humans. However, the scientific underpinnings of land use-induced zoonotic spillover and transmission through the agricultural matrix have received little attention from the scientific community. Agricultural landscapes are socioecological dynamical systems that can have complex and sometimes contradictory effects on the zoonotic pathogen infect–shed–spill–spread cascade pathways. Therefore, it is important to engage in interdisciplinary collaborations to generate new knowledge that can inform ways to achieve landscape immunity. Ecologists and conservation biologists working on zoonosis have traditionally focused on understanding how biodiversity loss impacts host reservoirs, while epidemiologists have focused on the pathogens, and also examined conditions at household and human community levels that influence rates of transmission of infectious diseases. This symposium is an attempt to stimulate interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations to advance toward a more holistic understanding of land use implications for zoonotic disease emergence beyond the simplistic assumption that deforestation and agricultural conversion reduce biodiversity and therefore increase the probability of emergence and epidemics of zoonotic diseases. Globally, food systems have massive impacts on ecosystems and agricultural practices, including interactions between humans and animals, and therefore they constitute a fundamental driver of the emergence of zoonotic diseases. But a landscape dominated by large scale intensive agricultural plantations is very different, ecologically and socio-politically, from a landscape dominated by indigenous and/or small-scale landholders practicing diverse agroecological farming. This symposium will highlight these differences and engage in a more nuanced approach that recognizes the complexities of agricultural landscapes and how these affect the emergence and transmission of zoonotic diseases. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to the development of science-based management and policy that can generate agricultural landscapes that protect human health, advance food sovereignty and security, and minimize zoonotic disease risk.