Effects of yard waste compost and maize (Zea mays) cultivar on population densities of plant-parasitic nematodes were examined in four experiments in north Florida. In one experiment, eight maize cultivars were evaluated; the other three experiments involved split-plot designs with compost treatments as main plots and maize cultivars as subplots. The three compost treatments used in these exper...

Maize streak virus (MSV) contributes significantly to the problem of extremely low African maize yields. Whilst a diverse range of MSV and MSV-like viruses are endemic in sub-Saharan Africa and neighbouring islands, only a single group of maize-adapted variants - MSV subtypes A(1)-A(6) - causes severe enough disease in maize to influence yields substantially. In order to assist in designing eff...

Maize (Zea mays) pollen is highly nutritious and can be used by predatory arthropods to supplement or replace a carnivorous diet. We demonstrate that maize pollen can be utilized by larvae of the green lacewing, Chrysoperla carnea (Neuroptera: Chrysopidae) under laboratory conditions. Complete development on maize pollen was not possible, but 25% of neonates reached the third instar. When only ...

Current technology using corn stover (CS) as feedstock, Ammonia Fiber Expansion (AFEX) as the pretreatment technology, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae 424A(LNH-ST) as the ethanologenic strain in Separate Hydrolysis and Fermentation was able to achieve 191.5 g EtOH/kg untreated CS, at an ethanol concentration of 40.0 g/L (5.1 vol/vol%) without washing of pretreated biomass, detoxification, or nutri...

This study was carried out to determine the effects of free choice feeding of starter feed and whole cereals on the growth of turkey poults. Two hundred-seventy poults (7-d old) were divided into 3 treatment groups each with 3 replications containing 15 males and 15 females. Control poults (C) were fed only on starter feed (280 g CP and 11.7 MJ ME/kg). Treatments for choice-fed turkey poults we...

This study employed the quadratic classification function analysis to examine the influence of farmer's socio-demographic and varietal characteristics of maize on adoption of improved maize varieties (IMVs) in the Wa Municipality of the Upper West region of Ghana. The results showed that, farm labour, information availability about the variety, weed resistance, low yielding variety, early matur...

This study measured the impacts of drought tolerant maize varieties (DTMVs) on productivity, welfare, and risk exposure using household and plot-level data from rural Nigeria. The study employed an endogenous switching regression approach to control for both observed and unobserved sources of heterogeneity between adopters and non-adopters. Our results showed that adoption of DTMVs increased ma...

A publication reporting the harmful effects on the monarch butterfly of maize genetically modified to express insecticidal delta-endotoxins from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) caused much public interest. A series of ecologically based studies were subsequently carried out to evaluate rigorously the impact of pollen from such crops and to quantify the risks. The results demonstr...

The international prices of many agricultural commodities have increased significantly over the past two years. After falling sharply during the global financial crisis, the IMF Food Price Index has increased by 50 per cent since the end of 2008 and is now above its earlier peak in mid 2008. Supply disruptions have been an important factor behind the recent rise in the relative price of food, w...

The insecticidal IE648 toxin is a truncated Cry1Ie protein with increased toxicity against Asian corn borer (ACB). Cry toxins are pore-forming toxins that disrupt insect midgut cells to kill the larvae. However, the peritrophic membrane (PM) is an important barrier that Cry toxins must cross before binding to midgut cells. Previously, it was shown that Cry toxins are able to bind and accumulate...