Food production is considered to be the main source of human impact on the environment and the concerns about detrimental effects of pesticides on biodiversity and human health are likely to lead to an increasingly restricted use of chemicals in agriculture. Since the first successful field trial, pheromone based mating disruption enabled sustainable insect control, which resulted in reduced le...

Farming systems for pest control, based on the stimulo-deterrent diversionary strategy or push-pull system, have become an important target for sustainable intensification of food production. A prominent example is push-pull developed in sub-Saharan Africa using a combination of companion plants delivering semiochemicals, as plant secondary metabolites, for smallholder farming cereal production...

BACKGROUND Although increasingly sophisticated environmental measures are being applied to species distributions models, the focus remains on using climatic data to provide estimates of habitat suitability. Climatic tolerance estimates based on expert knowledge are available for a wide range of plants via the USDA PLANTS database. We aim to test how climatic tolerance inferred from plant distri...

This paper discusses archaeobotanical remains of naked barley recovered from the Okhotsk cultural layers of the Hamanaka 2 archaeological site on Rebun Island, northern Japan. Calibrated ages (68% confidence interval) of the directly dated barley remains suggest that the crop was used at the site ca. 440-890 cal yr AD. Together with the finds from the Oumu site (north-eastern Hokkaido Island), ...

Production of foreign molecules in transgenic plants is anticipated to be an alternative to already established, microbial or animal expression systems with lower production costs. This article reviews the different technologies and approaches currently used to produce economically interesting molecules in plants or plant cell cultures, to evaluate their technical feasibility and economic impli...

The origins of farming is the defining event of human history--the one turning point that has resulted in modern humans having a quite different type of lifestyle and cognition to all other animals and past types of humans. With the economic basis provided by farming, human individuals and societies have developed types of material culture that greatly augment powers of memory and computation, ...

Between 12 000 and 8000 years ago a variety of different farming systems began to appear around the world. The emergence of farming reflects the coevolution of humans and plants, in that both acted to transform the other. Over the millennia more than 300 different plants have been domesticated, of which about 25 are today considered staples. Different plants and techniques appropriate to their ...

Fertility is a very old concept and many definitions are available in literature. The first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française in 1694 defines fertility as: “quality of that which is fertile; good farming is that which contributes most to the fertility of the soil” (the capacity of a soil to produce a large harvest). A more accurate definition appeared in the 18th century in th...

Organic agriculture as well as good agricultural practices (GAPs) intrigues the concern of both consumers and producers of agricultural commodities. Bio-preparates of various rhizospheric microorganisms (RMOs) are potential sources of biological inputs supporting plant nutrition and health. The response of open-field potatoes to the application of RMO bio-preparates, the biofertilizer "Bioferti...

The recent intensification of the arable landscape by modern agriculture has had negative effects on biodiversity. Organic farming has been introduced to mitigate negative effects, but is organic farming beneficial to biodiversity? In this review, we summarize recent research on the effects of organic farming on arable biodiversity of plants, arthropods, soil biota, birds, and mammals. The ecos...