Availability of mass flowering plants in landscapes dominated by agriculture can have a strong positive impact on the density of generalist, native pollinators. Row-crop production in Iowa accounts for 75% of the arable acres, with corn, Zea mays, representing the majority of hectares planted. To date, there has been no description of the insect pollinator community found within Iowa cornfields...

Most eukaryotes develop close interactions with microorganisms that are essential for their performance and survival. Thus, eukaryotes and prokaryotes in nature can be considered as meta-organisms or holobionts. Consequently, microorganisms that colonize different plant compartments contain the plant's second genome. In this respect, many studies in the last decades have shown that plant-microb...

Insect pollination is of great importance to crop production worldwide and honey bees are amongst its chief facilitators. Because of the decline of managed colonies, the use of sensor technology is growing in popularity and it is of interest to develop new methods which can more accurately and less invasively assess honey bee colony status. Our approach is to use accelerometers to measure vibra...

From 1985 to 2002, most Federal conservation dollars going to farm operators have been to retire land from crop production. Yet most U.S. farmland (850 million acres) remains in active production. The Farm Security and Rural Investment (FSRI) Act of 2002 sharply increased conservation funding and earmarked most of the increase for working-land payment programs (WLPPs). The design and implementa...

In this study, the cry1Ab gene of previously characterized and Lepidoptera-, Diptera-, and Coleoptera-active Bacillus thuringiensis SY49-1 strain was cloned, expressed and individually tested on Ephestia kuehniella (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) and Plodia interpunctella (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae) larvae. pET-cry1Ab plasmids were constructed by ligating the cry1Ab into pET28a (+) expression vector. Con...

K. CHENG, M. YAN, D. NAYAK, G. X. PAN*, P. SMITH, J. F. ZHENG AND J. W. ZHENG 1 Institute of Resource, Ecosystem and Environment of Agriculture, and Center of Climate Change and Agriculture, Nanjing Agricultural University, 1 Weigang, Nanjing 210095, China 2 Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, 23 St Machar Drive, Aberdeen AB...

The goal of microbiome engineering is to manipulate the microbiome toward a certain type of community that will optimize plant functions of interest. For instance, in crop production the goal is to reduce disease susceptibility, increase nutrient availability increase abiotic stress tolerance and increase crop yields. Various approaches can be devised to engineer the plant-microbiome, but one p...

A partial equilibrium model of stochastic crop production is used to analyze the impacts of subsidized crop insurance on the extensive margin of agricultural production. It is shown that land use is unchanged only when an actuarially fair, perfectly separating insurance contract is offered. For actuarially fair, pooling equilibrium contracts, however, land with a minimum quality that is strictl...

Our knowledge of ecological interactions that bolster ecosystem function and productivity has broad applications to the management of agricultural systems. Studies suggest that the presence of generalist predators in agricultural landscapes leads to a decrease in the abundance of herbivorous pests, but our understanding of how these interactions vary across taxa and along gradients of managemen...

Expenditures on agricultural research in the public sector, including the International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs) have stagnated and in some cases, declined sharply in recent years. This has focused attention on issues of efficiency of agricultural research systems, especially the number, size, scope, type, and locations of their programs. This paper examines the issue of research e...