Open access, freely available online " Some qualities nature carefully fi xes and transmits, but some, and those the fi ner, she exhales with the breath of the individual as too costly to perpetuate. But I notice also that they may become fi xed and permanent in any stock, by painting and repainting them on every individual, until at last nature adopts them and bakes them into her porcelain " —...

Thinking about population as a driver of agricultural development provides insights into induced technical and institutional change, whether it be Esther Boserup’s declining fallow period, modern crop varieties, or the specialization pyramid that arises in laborintensive agriculture. The non-convexities of research and development, infrastructure investments, and specialization imply that modes...

Understanding plant's defense mechanisms and their response to biotic stresses is of fundamental meaning for the development of resistant crop varieties and more productive agriculture. The Brassica genus involves a large variety of economically important species and cultivars used as vegetable source, oilseeds, forage and ornamental. Damage caused by pathogens attack affects negatively various...

Modern communication and sensor technology coupled with powerful pattern recognition algorithms for information extraction and classification allow the development and use of integrated systems to tackle environmental problems. This integration is particularly promising for applications in crop farming, where such systems can help to control growth and improve yields while harmful environmental...

Eradicating hunger and malnutrition is a key development goal of the 21st century. We address the problem of optimally identifying seed varieties to reliably increase crop yield within a risk-sensitive decision making framework. Specifically, we introduce a novel hierarchical machine learning mechanism for predicting crop yield (the yield of different seed varieties of the same crop). We integr...

Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is an important oilseed crop grown in our country. Majority of crop is under rainfed conditions and as a post rainy season (Rabi) crop in Andhra Pradesh. Several models are available to predict the phenology, growth and yield of groundnut crop. However, no precise models are available to validate the effects of moisture stress on groundnut and their subsequent im...

Assessing the performance and the characteristics (e.g. yield, quality, disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance) of new varieties is a key component of crop performance improvement. However, the variety testing process is presently exclusively based on experimental field approaches which inherently reduces the number and the diversity of experienced combinations of varieties x environmenta...

The overuse of agricultural chemicals such as fertilizer and pesticides aimed at increasing crop yield results in environmental damage, particularly in the Sahelian zone where soils are fragile. Crop inoculation with beneficial soil microbes appears as a good alternative for reducing agricultural chemical needs, especially for small farmers. This, however, requires selecting optimal combination...

Rainfall variability has a significant impact on crop production with manifestations in frequent crop failure in semiarid areas. This study used the parameterized APSIM crop model to investigate how rainfall variability may affect yields of improved sorghum varieties based on long-term historical rainfall and projected climate. Analyses of historical rainfall indicate a mix of nonsignificant an...