One component of developing a systematic approach for deployment of trap crops is to understand how the trap crop modifies pest behavior. Glossy-leafed collards, Brassica oleracea L. var. acephala (Brassicaceae), were evaluated as a potential trap crop for diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella (L.) (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae), because they are attractive to P. xylostella adults and are a poor ho...

Meeting crop nitrogen (N) demand while minimizing N losses to the environment has proven difficult despite significant field research and modeling efforts. To improve N management, several real-time N management tools have been developed with a primary focus on enhancing crop production. However, no coordinated effort exists to simultaneously address sustainability concerns related to N losses ...

Certain experimental horticultural operations require an autonomous vehicle capable of navigating through a field of crop plants. An image analysis system exists which can locate the crop row structure, but simple reactive control of the vehicle on the basis of this data would not be sufficiently reliable; instead a multisensor data fusion based approach is preferred. Since the vehicle must be ...

Rice crop height is an important agronomic trait linked to plant type and yield potential. This research developed an automatic image processing technique to detect rice crop height based on images taken by a digital camera attached to a field server. The camera acquires rice paddy images daily at a consistent time of day. The images include the rice plants and a marker bar used to provide a he...

Agricultural landscape intensification has enabled food production to meet growing demand. However, there are concerns that more simplified cropland with lower crop diversity, less noncrop habitat, and larger fields results in increased use of pesticides due to a lack of natural pest control and more homogeneous crop resources. Here, we use data on crop production and insecticide use from over ...

Diversification of field edges is widely used as a strategy to augment pollinator populations and, in turn, supplement crop pollination needs. Hedgerow plantings, a commonly applied field-scale diversification technique, have been shown to increase wild bee richness within edges and into crop fields; however, their effects on pollination services in mass-flowering, pollinator-dependent crops ty...

In the context of site-specific weed management by vision systems, an efficient image processing for a crop/weed discrimination is required in order to quantify the Weed Infestation Rate (WIR) in an image. This paper presents a modeling of crop field in presence of different Weed Infestation Rates and a set of simulated agronomic images is used to test and validate the effectiveness of a crop/w...

A field experiment was conducted to evaluate the yield and chemical composition of triticalegrain in different crop rotation and tillage systems. The first experimental factor was thecropping system – a) crop rotation and b) monoculture and the second factor was the tillagesystem – 1) conventional (CT), 2) reduced (RT) and 3) no-tillage (NT). The spring triticale yieldwas found to be 15.4% high...

The design and operation of supplementary irrigation schemes are dependent upon an accurate estimation of the "total available moisture" in the soil. This has been defined as the amount of water held between the limits of field capacity and wilting point in the effective rooting depth of the crop. Under irrigated conditions the effective rooting depth is that depth of soil from which the crop c...