High-density apple (Malus domestica) orchard management techniques and productivity were evaluated on an old orchard replant site in North Carolina. Trees were planted at 5 × 10 ft (1.5 × 3.0 m), giving a tree density of 871 trees/acre (2152 trees/ha). Well-branched ‘Smoothee Golden Delicious’ trees on ‘Mark’ rootstock were planted in 1990. Orchard-management factors which increased cumulative ...

Cost of production and returns in growing mango orchard are estimated in different ways compared to annual crops. The present study has been designed to investigate cost of production, and returns per acre over the life time of mango trees. A sample of 20 mango growing farmers was taken purposively from various villages of Multan district. The objective was to work out benefit cost ratio and ne...

An algorithm of generating navigation path in orchard for harvesting robot based on machine vision was presented. According to the features of orchard images, a horizontal projection method was adopted to dynamically recognize the main trunks area. Border crossing points between the tree and the earth were detected by scanning the trunks areas, and these points were divided into two clusters on...

Comprehensive Automation for Specialty Crops (CASC) is a four-year project to develop crop intelligence and agricultural automation technologies for the apple and nursery tree industries. Supported by the USDA Specialty Crop Research Initiative, CASC aims at impacting industry where it matters most: increasing production efficiency and reducing labor costs. In this paper we present our most rec...

During 1998-2003, we used populations of the solitary bee Osmia lignaria Say to pollinate a commercial sweet cherry orchard in northern Utah. Bee densities released each year ranged from 1290 to 1857 females/ha, with approximately twice as many males. Female progeny produced each year were greater than parental populations released, except in 2003, when nesting was poor due to bird predation. D...

the aim of this research was to measure the relative efficiency of forest management plans in north of iran. in order to fulfill the research, data of 12 forest management plans were collected from the financial balance sheets of shafaroud forest company during a ten years period. first of all, basic data envelopment analysis (dea) models (bcc and ccr) were used to determine the efficiency. the...

One of the tools for optimal crop production is regular monitoring and assessment of crops. During the growing season of fruit trees, the bloom period has increased photosynthetic rates that correlate with the fruiting process. This paper presents the development of an image processing algorithm to detect peach blossoms on trees. Images of an experimental peach orchard were acquired from the Pa...

This paper analyzes the characteristics of the NPS nitrogen pollution of the groundwater in Guoyuan Village, Pudong District, Shanghai. And the associated effects on the surface and groundwater around the study area are discussed in detail based on the successive observed data, DNDC and L-THIA model. The results show that both of the surface and groundwater are polluted so seriously that they a...

Stress-related biophysical variables of capital intensive orchard crops can be estimated with proxies via spectral vegetation indices from off-nadir viewing satellite imagery. However, variable viewing compositions affect the relationship between spectral vegetation indices and stress-related variables (i.e., chlorophyll content, water content and Leaf Area Index (LAI)) and could obstruct chang...