The use of non-destructive devices like Delta-T-LeafAreaMeter and Canegro Models can help farmers to manage their cane crops and have an understanding of the importance of measurement of physiological parameters so as to maximize cane and sugar yields. This study was conducted on sandy clay loams of the lithosol group under the Zimbabwe soil classification system at The Zimbabwe Sugar Associati...

The potential for lead (Pb) and arsenic (As) transfer into vegetables was studied on old orchard land contaminated by lead arsenate pesticides. Root (carrot), leafy (lettuce), and vegetable fruits (green bean, tomato) were grown on seven "miniplots" with soil concentrations ranging from near background to ≈ 800 and ≈ 200 mg kg-1 of total Pb and As, respectively. Each miniplot was divided into s...

Crop selection often leads to dramatic morphological diversification, in which allocation to the harvestable component increases. Shifts in allocation are predicted to impact (as well as rely on) physiological traits; yet, little is known about the evolution of gas exchange and related anatomical features during crop diversification. In Brassica rapa, we tested for physiological differentiation...

African oil palm has the highest productivity amongst cultivated oleaginous crops. Species can constitute a single crop capable to fulfill the growing global demand for vegetable oils, which is estimated to reach 240 million tons by 2050. Two types of vegetable oil are extracted from the palm fruit on commercial scale. The crude palm oil and kernel palm oil have different fatty acid profiles, w...

Weed control is one of the most labor-intensive tasks for organic vegetable farms, and a realtime crop recognition system is the main challenge to develop the automatic mechanical weeding system. One solution using time-of-flight (TOF) 3D camera and advanced computation technique based on FPGA is proposed to address this problem. It has great advantages and can work reliably in the real harsh w...

The objectives were to promote farmer adoption of reduced and modified tillage (RT) systems and to investigate the efficacy of deep zone tillage systems to reduce the disease severity in crops affected by Phytophthora capcisi. It was our intent to evaluate the ability of reduced tillage (RT) systems to ameliorate large fluctuations in water supply, which may result from climate change and, in p...

Large-scale dairy farms around Damascus do not have enough land for forage cultivation mainly due to high price of land, allocation of land for vegetable production, which is more economically important than fodder cultivation and unfavourable climatic factors. Farms are therefore forced to transport roughage from distant crop cultivating areas. In the case of the dairy farm described in this w...