lack of sewage collection systems, percolation of surface waters, and seepage of wells have raised the groundwater table in shiraz area in the south of iran. the growing population generates environmental pollution resulting in the degradation of the quality of surface and groundwaters used for agriculture. inorganic and organic pollutants have been traced in shiraz water resources. heavy metal...

An Expert System is a system that employs human knowledge captured in a computer to solve problems that ordinarily require human expertise. In agriculture, expert systems unite the accumulated expertise of individual disciplines, such as plant pathology, entomology, horticulture and agricultural meteorology and Animal Sciences; into a framework that best addresses the specific, on-site needs of...

A workshop on "Chips, Computers and Crops" was held in Hangzhou, China during September 26-27, 2008. The main objective of the workshop was to bring together China and UK scientists from mathematics, bioinformatics and plant molecular biology communities to exchange ideas, enhance awareness of each others' fields, explore synergisms and make recommendations on fruitful future directions in crop...

The Southeast Asian Universities Agroecosystem network (SUAN) has used five system properties to assess agroecosystem performance: productivity, stability, sustainability, equitability and autonomy. Assessing these properties can be useful for agricultural research and development, but the assessment is complicated by several factors. First is the multidimensional character of these properties,...

Strategies and best practices for the co-existence of GM and non-GM crops need to be developed and implemented with the participation of farmers and other stakeholders. According to the principle of 'subsidiarity', decisions should be made by the lowest authority possible. When applying this concept to the case of GM crops, the affected society should determine their use and management in a reg...

Greenhouses have been extremely successful in providing abundant, cheap and high-quality produce, by using resources (water, minerals, pesticides) with a very high economic efficiency. Marginal agricultural land is being rapidly converted into protected cultivation in many (semi-arid) regions of the world, hoping to prosper both from primary and secondary activities. Water use efficiency of gre...

†Background Agricultural systems are amended ecosystems with a variety of properties. Modern agroecosystems have tended towards high through-flow systems, with energy supplied by fossil fuels directed out of the system (either deliberately for harvests or accidentally through side effects). In the coming decades, resource constraints over water, soil, biodiversity and land will affect agricultu...

Agricultural system models have become important tools to provide predictive and assessment capability to a growing array of decision-makers in the private and public sectors. Despite ongoing research and model improvements, many of the agricultural models today are direct descendants of research investments initially made 30-40 years ago, and many of the major advances in data, information and...

In order to effectively implement sharing and integrated application of agricultural remote monitoring data, which is of distributed areas, various types, different systems and a large amount of data, across different areas, departments and systems, new networked framework is needed to be introduced to promote sharing of resources. In this paper, based on grid, considering the current situation...

B. Nielsen*, S.M. Thamsborg, H.R. Andersen, T. Kristensen Organic Animal Health and Production, Department of Animal Science and Animal Health, Royal Veterinary Agricultural University, Groennegaardsvej 2, DK-1870 Frederiksberg C, Denmark Department of Animal Nutrition and Physiology, Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Foulum, Postbox 50, 8830 Tjele, Denmark Department of Agricultural S...