Over one billion tons of agricultural, municipal, and industrial wastes with potential uses in agriculture are generated annually in the United States. Many of these materials are applied to agricultural land because of the benefits they provide. These benefits include: providing a nutrient source for crops; improving soil chemical, physical and biological properties; improving water storage an...

In the world’s highest tropical mountain range, the Cordillera Blanca of Peru, impacts linked to climatic change, increasing pressures on water resources, rapidly rising petroleum costs and shifting market conditions are threatening the viability of agricultural systems. Currently, these distinct processes of change are converging in ways that significantly enhance and reinforce their negative ...

Crop phenotyping is a prerequisite to enable robots doing agricultural tasks, evaluating crop status for farm management, and relating genotypes to phenotypes for crop breeding among others. Optical three dimensional (3-D) sensors have been preferred since they provide more information about the complex plant architecture. The improvement of time-of-flight (TOF) cameras together with their redu...

Since the early 1980s, donors and international These reform experiments have revealed eight lending agencies have promoted the reform of main lessons: agricultural marketing as a central component of economy wide structural adjustment programs in Africa. Although the record of implementation has often been slow and uneven, staple food marketing policy has been transformed over this period. The...

Industrial or “Green Revolution” agriculture depends upon petroleum to manufacture and spread fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and to power irrigation systems that act upon crops selected to increase agricultural yield. It has been criticized on the grounds that it has favored mainly rich farmers and caused serious environmental pollution. Now a second “Green Revolution” is being proposed...

The use of new technologies including Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the Global Positioning System (GPS), Variable Rate Technology (VRT), and Remote Sensing (RS) is gaining acceptance in the present high-technology, precision agricultural industry. GIS provides the ability to link multiple data values for the same geo-referenced location, and provides the user with a graphical visualizat...

The purpose of this paper is to present calculations of total costs of 13 alien invasive species (AIS) in Sweden. All species are subject to control by Swedish public authorities, and estimates for most AIS include either damage cost or actual control cost. The results indicate a total annual cost between approximately 1620 and 5080 million SEK, which correspond to SEK 175 and SEK 565 per capit...

The free trade and marketing across borders of food and agricultural products have reduced their prices, and have consequently been pushing down the prices of agricultural machinery. Utilizing the worldwide industrial infrastructure, the manufacturing industry, including agricultural machinery manufacturers, has expanded the worldwide sourcing of materials and components and complied with such ...

Malawi has exceptionally high rates of population growth (3.1%) and deforestation (2.4%), suggesting a Malthusian link between the two. The most important proximal cause of forest loss in Malawi has been the expansion of agricultural land. Population growth has been an important driver for this process, but is an insufficient explanation by itself. In Malawi’s case, it has been coupled with a l...