Agricultural sustainability has become a major concern in arid regions of China. In order to better understand the influence of continuous cropping on soil quality, six experimental fields were established in the Alar Oasis of Xinjiang, including uncultivated land (as a zero year treatment duration) and five different continuous cropping years on cotton fields, with different cropping durations...

Bt cotton was approved for commercial cultivation in India in March 2002 after stringent assessment for biosafety and profitability. The Bt-cotton area increased from a meager 0.4% to 40% of the cotton area in India, in a short period of four years. The technology was found to result in many positive benefits for Indian agriculture, especially in terms of reducing farmer stress from management ...

Cotton leaf curl disease (CLCuD), the most complex disease of cotton, is a major limiting biotic factor to worldwide cotton productivity. Several whitefly-transmitted monopartite begomoviruses causing CLCuD have been characterized and designated as CLCuD-associated begomoviruses. Despite of being reported over 100 years ago in Africa, CLCuD became economically pandemic causing massive losses to...

Cotton is one of the major crops cultivated in the Texas Rolling Plains region, and it is a major contributor to the regional economy. Cotton cultivation in this region is facing severe challenges due to an increase in the frequency of droughts and a projected decrease in rainfall in the future. Development and evaluation of deficit irrigation strategies for this region could potentially conser...

Transgenic cottons producing Cry toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) provide for control of lepidopteran pests and were first commercially grown in Australia, Mexico and the USA in 1996. As of 2007, a total of six additional countries (Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, and South Africa) now grow Bt cotton on a total production area of 14 million hectares. The technology primarily p...

Estimates of crop yield are desirable for managing agricultural lands. Remote sensing is the one technology that can give an unbiased view of large areas, with spatially explicit information distribution and time repetition, and has thus been widely used to estimate crop yield and offers great potential for monitoring production, yet the uncertainties associated with large-scale crop yield esti...

Bio-economic efficiency of different cotton-based intercropping systems was determined at the Agronomic Research Area, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, (Pakistan) during 1996-97 and 1997-98. Cotton cultivar NIAB-78 was planted in 80-cm apart single rows and 120-cm spaced double row strips with the help of a single row hand drill. Intercropping systems were cotton alone, and cotton + mungb...

Land-treatment of petroleum wastes is a widely used industrial practice, yet there has been no comprehensive evaluation of the long-term risks to human or terrestrial ecosystems from such practices. We evaluated cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus) populations on three sites in Oklahoma (USA) that historically used land-treatment for disposal of various petroleum wastes (July 1995-March 1997). Averag...

Kazakhstan is the second largest country to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Consequent to the abrupt institutional changes surrounding the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Kazakhstan has reportedly undergone extensive land cover/land use change. Were the institutional changes sufficiently great to affect land surface phenology at spatial resolutions and exten...

As regards decreasing cotton cultivation in Iran during these years, the degree of risk taken by a cotton cultivator in the agricultural part is important. The studies showed that the cotton crop yield during the past years did not have enough growth and the cotton cost product in the period of study cotton production costs, has increased. In this paper, the risk orientation of cotton cultivato...