Dominance of chemical agriculture from last few decades has deteriorated the soil health and created problem of disposal of agricultural waste in rural areas. It is important to maintain environmental and agricultural sustainability without reducing productivity. Vermiculture technology has been considered as a sound and viable option to regenerate the soil health through recycling the agricult...

During the twentieth century, agricultural production strived to achieve increased food production in order to satisfy both local and export demands. In many cases, this led to increased farm sizes and an operational separation of crop and livestock production. Society fears that the trend of increasing centralization and industrialization of agriculture, specifically animal agriculture, has re...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In many of the third world countries like India, uncontrolled land disposal of municipal solid waste is a common practice even today. Various studies have indicated that the unregulated waste dumps and landfills cause serious environmental and human health hazards, one of them being groundwater contamination. In order to prevent further groundwater contamination from the uncon...

Biofuels are a major topic of global interest and technology development. Whereas bioenergy crop production is highly dependent on water, bioenergy development requires effective allocation and management of water. The objectives of this investigation were to assess the bioenergy production relative to the impacts on water resource related factors: (1) climate and weather impact on water suppli...

Nutrient recycling in a space-based Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS) will require an understanding of nutrient dosage effects on crop production, plant tissue partitioning, and geochemical fates within crop systems. Sodium (Na+), fluoride (F−), and iodide (I−) are found in human waste streams. These elements were examined using crops in hydroponic systems. Lettuce, radish, spinach, an...

Mechanization of cotton harvesting began in earnest in the Soviet Union in 1958 and was expected to proceed more rapidly than the market-driven process which had begun in the USA a decade earlier. Despite high output of cotton-picking machines, the share of the crop harvested mechanically grew more slowly than in the USA. Mechanical picking was resisted at the farm level on the basis of distort...

This paper presents a novel approach for guiding mobile robots inside greenhouses demonstrated by promising preliminary physical experiments. It represents a comprehensive attempt to use the successful principles of AGVs (auto-guided vehicles) inside greenhouses, but avoiding the necessity of modifying the crop layout, and avoiding having to bury metallic pipes in the greenhouse floor. The desi...

Energy crisis is receiving attention with regard to the global economy and environmental sustainable development. Developing new energy resources to optimize the energy supply structure has become an important measure to prevent energy shortage as well as achieving energy conservation and emission reduction in China. This study proposed the concept of energy agriculture and constructed an energ...

The effects of vermicomposts on plant parasitic, fungivorous and baterivorous nematode populations were investigated in grape (Vitis vinifera) and strawberry (Fragaria ananasa) field crops. Commercially-produced vermicomposts derived from recycled paper, and supermarket food waste were applied to replicated plots at the rates of 2.5 t ha–1 or 5.0 t ha–1 for the grape crop and 5.0 t ha–1 or10 t ...

THE EXISTING US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) makes commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol a priority, calling for 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuel production by 2022, sourced from grasses, trees, agricultural residues, and municipal waste. The US Department of Energy “US Billion-Ton Update” study (Downing et al. 2011) suggests that to meet the mandates in the RFS, approximately 66 million...