The Green Revolution of the 1960s brought about a dramatic rise in global crop yields. But, as most observers acknowledge, this has come at a considerable cost to biodiversity. Plant breeding, synthetic fertilizers, and mechanization steadily narrowed the number of crop varieties commercially available to farmers and promoted fencerow-to-fencerow monocultures. Many historians trace the origins ...

Maize originated under warm, seasonally dry conditions of Mesoamerica, and was by human selection converted from a low-yielding progenitor species into its modern form, with a large rachis (cob) of the female inflorescence bearing up to 1,000 seeds. Maize is a C4 plant and is very efficient in water use. If subjected to water stress, however, especially during the mid-season pollination process...

Agriculture is one of the most important and possibly the oldest economic activity developed by humans and it is becoming increasingly dependent on development of technologies (Alexandre, 2009). Agriculture in Africa is a subsistent, low technology and low-performing one which requires reduced drudgery and increased commercialization. For crop production, farmlands are cleared using cutlass and...

This paper takes a comparative approach to early farming, arguing that bioarchaeological work on Neolithic Europe can inform understanding of earlier cultivation and herding in the Near East, where the ‘package’ of crops and livestock emerged in the PPNB period. Evidence for intensive cultivation (‘garden agriculture’) integrated with small-scale herding is outlined for south-east and central E...

walnut is one of the important products in kerman province and baft town is the main area of ‎walnut orchards. so the technical, allocative and economical efficiency of walnut farmers computed ‎assign the degree of farmer’s success in the optimum allocation of their resources. at first the ‎proper production function was estimated, and then stochastic frontier production and technical, ‎efficie...

The application of crop processing models to macro-botanical assemblages has traditionally been used to interpret past husbandry practices and organisation of labour involved in crop-processing. Phytoliths offer an alternative method of analysis because they are durable in most environments, regardless of whether plant parts are charred, and the identification of plant types and plant parts all...

Agricultural Training Centres (ATCs) promote crop and livestock development by providing extension information to farmers and serving as models of improved crop and livestock husbandry practices. Although potato farmers in Nyandarua County were trained on potato production technologies, their average yield was ≤16 tonnes per hectare compared to the national potential of 30 tonnes. This study th...

Many factors have, of course, contributed to the expansion of this industry to its present day proportions but one of the most significant is undoubtedly the adaptability of the crop to such a wide range of growing conditions and also the simplicity of its culture. Sugarcane is truly a "pioneering" crop for its expansion has been not so much at the expense of other crops but rather by the openi...

BACKGROUND In Mexico, the traditional maize cultivation system has resisted intensification attempts for many decades in some areas, even in some well-connected regions of the temperate highlands. We suggest that this is due to economics. METHODS The total useful biomass of several fields in Nanacamilpa, Tlaxcala, are evaluated for productivity and costs. RESULTS Maize grain production is l...

Conservation tillage and even no tillage as a practice is not new. However, there appears to exist evidence that in some cases no-tillage is successfully incorporated into a new concept of truly sustainable agriculture, gaining popularity as “conservation agriculture” all over the world. Conservation Agriculture is, besides no-tillage and direct planting, based on very old concepts such as gree...