Sustainable agriculture, which is characterized by farming profitably while minimizing damage to the environment, is not easy to practice. “Conventional” agriculture in the USA is commonly considered to involve practices that have potential to damage the environment. These include tilling the soil excessively, overapplying readily soluble inorganic fertilizers (“chemical fertilizers”), and over...

The three key lepidopteran pests of cole, Brassica oleracea L., crops in North America are diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella (L.) (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae); cabbage looper; Trichoplusia ni (Hübner) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae); and imported cabbageworm, Pieris rapae (L.) (Lepidoptera: Pieridae). Two species-specific pheromone-based experimental attracticide formulations were evaluated against ...

Soil compaction has been recognised as the greatest problem in terms of damage to Australia's soil resource. Compaction by tractor and harvester tyres, related to traf®cking of wet soil, is one source of the problem. In this paper an array of soil properties was measured before and immediately after the application of a known compaction force to a wet Vertisol. A local grain harvester was used ...

World wide crop losses without the use of pesticides and other non-chemical control strategies is estimated to be about 70% of crop production, amounting to U.S. $ 400 billion. Many insect pest families are known which cause serious damage to agriculture crops. Insect pest menace is one of the major factors that destabilize crop productivity in agricultural ecosystems. They are responsible for ...

Striped cucumber beetle, Acalymma vittatum F., is the primary insect pest of cucurbit crops in the northeastern United States. Adult beetles colonize squash crops from field borders, causing feeding damage at the seedling stage and transmitting bacterial wilt Erwinia tracheiphila Hauben et al. 1999. Conventional control methods rely on insecticide applications to the entire field, but surroundi...

Abiotic stresses such as drought, cold, salt and heat cause reduction of plant growth and loss of crop yield worldwide. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) including hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), superoxide anions (O2 (•-)), hydroxyl radical (OH•) and singlet oxygen ((1)O2) are by-products of physiological metabolisms, and are precisely controlled by enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant defense system...

Insects-pest is animal populations, which occurred in every possible environment with a varied number of species. The several insects are vectors of different diseases, and cause damages to crop plants. These have been affecting economy and the yield of crop plant and at national and international market. The crop yield losses caused by insects in agriculture, several chemicals have been applie...

In the USA, cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus) is often sympatric with wild H. annuus, which is an agricultural weed that grows along roadsides and in other disturbed sites. We found that crop-to-wild gene flow was common (~5-40% hybrids) when wild plants occurred within <1,000 m of the crop, and crop-specific genetic markers persisted in wild populations for many generations. Crop-to-wil...

Herbicide use has provided agriculture with cost effective weed control and cont inued good crop yields, bu t occasional complications and adverse effects have been observed in the field. A recent review (1) discussed the effect of herbicides on plant diseases. Other studies have repor ted on the effects of herbicides on nematode infected crop plants (2,5,6,7,8,9,10,12). Effects ranged from agg...

A capture-mark-recapture study was conducted in crop fields in Morogoro, Tanzania, to investigate how the population dynamics of multimammate field rats, Mastomys natalensis, was influenced by the commonly practised land preparation methods and cropping systems. Two land preparation methods (tractor ploughing and slash and burn) and two cropping systems (mono-cropping with maize and inter-cropp...