This study was conducted in Florida in 1999 and 2000 to examine the impact of alternative crop production practices on soil quality and yields of fresh market pepper (Capsicum annuum). Replicated field plots were established on an organic vegetable farm that had been under certification for 5 years and on a conventional pepper farm that had been fumigated with methyl bromide for 25 consecutive ...

Farm households in developing countries are generally credit constrained. This forces them to simultaneously take production and consumption decisions. In this paper, a two-period lifecycle model of the farm household is constructed and the household’s investment response to changes in land and agricultural output prices are derived theoretically. It is shown that in the absence of credit marke...

*Manzul Kumar Hazarika, Institute of Industrial Science, Block-C, Ce-509, University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro, Tokyo 1538505, Japan; Kiyoshi Honda, Asian Center for Research on Remote Sensing, STAR Program, Asian Institute of Technology, P.O.Box 4, Khlong Luang, Pathumthani 12120 , Thailand. *Corresponding author: [email protected] ABSTRACT Soil erosion is a serious environmental p...

The use of antibiotics in animal husbandry contributes to the worldwide problem of increasing antibiotic resistance in animal and human pathogens. Intensive animal production is considered an important source of antibiotic resistance genes released to the environment, while the contribution of smaller farms remains to be evaluated. Here we monitor the spread of tetracycline resistance (TC-r) ge...

Although advocates of agroforestry have promoted soil conservation as one of its primary benefits, empirical estimates of these benefits have been lacking due to temporal and spatial complexity of agroforestry systems and soil resource dynamics. This study aims to reduce this gap by designing and testing a three stage farm level productivity methodology for economic evaluation of soil conservat...

The Tobacco CMO (Common Market Organization) is involved in a intense debate between the European tobacco industry and those who are against to a crop whose transformed product is dangerous to the health. European institutions have shown a strong interest in this complex issue introducing two Reforms (1992 and 1998) and one revision in 2004. This paper aims to analyse and investigate the socio-...

On-farm production of arbuscular mycorrhizal [AM] fungus inoculum can be employed to make the benefits of the symbiosis more available to vegetable farmers. Experiments were conducted to modify an existing method for the production of inoculum in temperate climates to make it more readily adoptable by farmers. Perlite, vermiculite, and peat based potting media were tested as diluents of yard cl...

Soil moisture forecast model based on genetic neural network is established because the soil moisture forecasting is nonlinear and complex. The weights and threshold value of BP network are optimized according to the total situation optimization ability of genetic algorithm, which can avoid effectively that BP network is vulnerable to run into the local minimum value as its poor total optimizat...