Agriculture is responsible for a significant proportion of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (perhaps 18% globally), and therefore has the potential to contribute to efforts to reduce emissions as a means of minimising the risk of dangerous climate change. The largest contributions to emissions are attributed to ruminant methane production and nitrous oxide from animal waste and fert...

Throughout the centuries, farmers have developed crop seeds from the rich genetic diversity of naturally occurring crop species. It is only since the early twentieth century that a commercial production of crop seeds has started to replace the hand labor of crop selection. The modern breeding activities as well as farmers’ participation will continue to change the production systems of all farm...

An empirical model, based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, was developed to test the hypothesis that differences in farmers goals, objectives and attitudes are a determinant of strategic and entrepreneurial behaviour and will, therefore, result in differences in farm size. The theory states that a person s behaviour results from his/her goals and intentions, attitudes, perceived behavioural ...

Breeding new and high performing cultivars with market-preferred traits take more than 10 years in the absence of an integrated pre-breeding programme. During early phases breeding a significant amount time, space resources are invested selection genetic advancement stages after initial crosses performed parental genotypes. Speed has potential to reduce time required for cultivar development, r...

this specialty fruit and was responsive to the industry need for reliably tested freestone varieties. A sequence of similar varieties over a period as long as for peaches is envisioned. As was true with peaches, main crop apricot varieties were static for many years. As a consequence, the varieties, mostly of European origin, became less well suited to changing market demands. Commercial drying...

Breeding objectives for beef cattle in Ireland were derived and used to define selection sub-indexes. The intention of the sub-indexes was to simplify selection decisions by commercial bull and semen buyers for situations where all of the resulting progeny are slaughtered, or when some female progeny are kept as replacement breeding cows. Separate sets of economic values for calving ease and ge...

Introduction. Pests, diseases and weeds (biotic stresses) are significant limiting factors for crop yield and production. However, the limitations associated with conventional breeding methods necessitated the development of alternative methods for improving new varieties with higher resistance to biotic stresses. Molecular techniques have developed applicable methods for genetic transformation...

Accordingly to the Arkansas Nematode Diagnostic Clinic 00 (Cooperative Extension Service, 00 ) the reniform nematode (Rotylenchulus reniformis Lindford and oliveira) (RN) is present in twelve counties in the state where most of the cotton (G. hirsutum) is cultivated. In fields infested with RN, yield losses are estimated at 340 to kg/ha (Robinson, 001). The RN is expected to become an even grea...

Sheep and goat breeds are selected worldwide for meat, wool, and dairy production, and breeding objectives also include other functional traits such as reproductive performance and disease resistance. In early 2007, the development of next-generation sequencing (NGS) allowed de novo sequencing of sheep (Jiang et al., 2014) and goat genomes (Dong et al., 2013). In turn, it offered an opportunity...

Genome wide selection and new methods of maize breeding The objectives of this work were to verify the accuracy of the Genome Wide Selection method (GWS) in the maize breeding for nutritional stress conditions and propose new breeding methods based on GWS. The efficiency of two components of use of nitrogen and phosphorus (absorption and utilization) was estimated in 41 single-cross hybrids ass...