The potential for application of ICT in the agro-sector is high. The new tools and techniques are evolving and the implications of that are clearly visible at the global scale. But the level of penetration of ICT is very low in India since the rural masses are not aware of the new technological innovations. The private initiative taken by Tata Chemicals Ltd started with an objective of providin...

Despite weeds are a serious threat to promotion of organic farming, relatively less attention is given to research on weed management. This article explores a scope of integration of conservation agriculture for weed control and soil protection under organic farming. Limitation in the use of agro-chemicals under OF promotes intensive tillage for weed control. Mostly, tillage leads to depletion ...

SUMMARY. Daisy is a Soil-Plant-Atmosphere system model designed to simulate water balance, heat balance, solute balance and crop production in agro-ecosystems subjected to various management strategies. The water balance model comprises a surface water balance and a soil water balance. The surface water includes a model for snow accumulation and melting, a model for interception, through-fall, ...

Earthworms are eco-friendly and play a variety of roles in agro ecosystem. The gut of earthworm is the factory to manufacture the beneficial microbial densities and their products. The excreted nutrients enrich thousand times more than the surrounding soil. Experiments have proven that crops grown in earthworm inhabitant soils had increased the yields from 25% to over 300% than in earthworm fre...

Organic molecules, such as pharmaceuticals, agro-chemicals and pigments, frequently form several crystal polymorphs with different physicochemical properties. Finding polymorphs has long been a purely experimental game of trial-and-error. Here we utilize in silico polymorph screening in combination with rationally planned crystallization experiments to study the polymorphism of the pharmaceutic...

5-Hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) is a versatile intermediate in biomass conversion pathways. However, the notoriously unstable nature of HMF imposes challenges to design selective routes to chemicals such as furan-2,5-dicarboxylic acid (FDCA). Here, a new strategy for obtaining furans is presented, bypassing the formation of the unstable HMF. Instead of starting with glucose/fructose and thus form...

Non-point source (NPS) pollution has been increasingly serious in China since the 1990s. The increases of agricultural NPS pollution in China is evaluated for the period 2000-2008 by surveying the literature on water and soil pollution from fertilizers and pesticides, and assessing the surplus nitrogen balance within provinces. The main causes for NPS pollution were excessive inputs of nitrogen...

Conventional wisdom holds that Sub-Saharan African farmers use few modern inputs despite the fact that most poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of inputs that embody improved technologies, particularly improved seed, fertilizers and other agro-chemicals, machinery, and irrigation. Yet following several years of high food prices, conce...

In this review article various applications and preparation methods of copper chromite catalysts have been discussed. While discussing it is concluded that copper chromite is a versatile catalyst which not only catalyses numerous processes of commercial importance and national program related to defence and space research but also finds applications in the most concerned problem worldwide i.e. ...