Given the unlimited needs of mankind and the limited resources available, human beings have always been thinking about how to use the available resources and facilities optimally. Energy plays an important role in economic activities and it is of great importance in agriculture. Over the past four decades, energy consumption in the agricultural sector has increased tremendously. In Iran, energy...

This paper presents a decision support system (DSS) for sustainable development and environmental protection of agricultural regions developed in the framework of the Interreg-Archimed project entitled WaterMap (development and utilization of vulnerability maps for the monitoring and management of groundwater resources in the ARCHIMED areas). Its aim is to optimize the production plan of an agr...

Jack A. Morgan is plant physiologist and Feike Dijkstra is post-doc research ecologist at the Rangeland Resources Research Unit, Ronald F. Follett is research leader and soil scientist and Stephen Del Grosso is a soil scientist and ecologist at the Soil Plant Nutrient Research Unit, USDA Agricultural Research Service Northern Plains Area, Fort Collins, Colorado. Leon Hartwell Allen Jr. is soil ...

For almost two decades Brazil has become an important producer and consumer of biofuels as an energy alternative. The need to replace fossil fuels with clean fuels has given Brazilian ethanol an outstanding position. With the market promising, Brazil has been the scene of a growth of the cultivation of sugarcane monocultures to supply the sugarcane industry in the production of ethanol, sugar a...

Molecular breeding of crops is an efficient way to upgrade plant functions useful to mankind. A key step is forward genetics or positional cloning to identify the genes that confer useful functions. In order to accelerate the whole research process, we have developed an integrated database system powered by an intelligent data-retrieval engine termed PosMed-plus (Positional Medline for plant up...

Livelihoods of the rural people of Ethiopia depend on agriculture. However, erratic nature of rain and prevalence of drought in the country make agricultural production a challenge. To counter this problem, use of the available water resource for irrigation development is the most promising option. Ketar small scale irrigation scheme is found in Ketar-Genet Peasant association, Tiyo District, A...

Should agricultural development programmes target women in order to increase productivity? This article analyzes the challenges in distinguishing women's agricultural productivity from that of men. Most of the literature compares productivity on plots managed by women with those managed by men, ignoring the majority of agricultural households in which men and women are both involved in manageme...

UNLABELLED The integration-based genome database provides useful information through a user-friendly web interface that allows analysis of comparative genome for agricultural plants. We have concentrated on the functional bioinformatics of major agricultural resources, such as rice, Chinese cabbage, rice mutant lines, and microorganisms. The major functions are focused on functional genome anal...