Mixed cropping (including agroforestry) often gives yield advantages as opposed to monocropping. Many criteria have been used to assess yield advantage in crop mixtures. Some of these are presented. In addition, the relative merits of replacement, additive and bivariate factorial designs are discussed. The concepts of analysis of mixed cropping are applied to an example of an alley cropping (a ...

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...

An Egyptian national program targets annual reuse of 2.4 billion m3 of treated wastewater (TWW) to irrigate 84,000 ha of manmade forests in areas close to treatment plants and in the desert. To evaluate the feasibility of such afforestation efforts, we describe information about TWW irrigation strategies based on (1) water use of different tree species, (2) weather conditions in different clima...

This paper probes effects of the evolvement of labor resources on technical efficiency in crop production in rural China. Based on twelve years of data on crop production of 30 provinces in China, a stochastic frontier production function model is used to measure crop production efficiency in three crop-functional areas—the production area, the consumption area, and the balanced area. Then effe...

The capacity of US agriculture to increase the output of specific foods to accommodate increased demand is not well documented. This research uses geospatial modeling to examine the capacity of the US agricultural landbase to increase the per capita availability of an example set of nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables. These fruits and vegetables were selected based on nutrient content and an ...

Some imidazolinone herbicides have been shown to be mobile in soil, raising concern about their possible movement to ground water. Three imidazolinone herbicides (imazamethabenz-methyl, 497 g ha(-1); imazethapyr, 14.7 g ha(-1); and imazamox, 14.7 g ha(-1)) commonly used in crop production on the Canadian prairies were applied to a tile-drained field to assess their susceptibility to leach when ...

The analysis and forecasting of extreme climatic events has become increasingly relevant to planning effective financial and food-related interventions in third-world countries. Natural disasters and climate change, both large and small scale, have a great impact on non-industrialized populations who rely exclusively on activities such as crop production, fishing, and similar livelihood activit...

In terrestrial ecosystems, ecological processes and patterns within focal patches frequently depend on their matrix. Crop fields (focal patches) are often surrounded by a mosaic of other land-use types (matrix), which may act as habitats for organisms and differ in terms of the immigration activities of organisms to the fields. We examined whether matrix quality affects wild pollinator abundanc...

Land use intensity is an important indicator of human activities, so we quantified the land use intensity and five ecosystem services (soil conservation, water conservation, carbon storage, net primary productivity (NPP), and crop production) in 13 subbasins of the Tabu River Basin in an agro-pastoral ecotone in central Inner Mongolia. Furthermore, we analyzed the relationships among ecosystem ...