Pesticides used in agriculture may cause adverse health effects among the population living near agricultural areas. However, identifying the populations most likely to be exposed is difficult. We conducted a feasibility study to determine whether satellite imagery could be used to reconstruct historical crop patterns. We used historical Farm Service Agency records as a source of ground referen...

Crop rotation has been practiced for centuries in an effort to improve agricultural yield. However, the directions, magnitudes, and mechanisms of the yield effects of various crop rotations remain poorly understood in many systems. In order to better understand how crop rotation influences cotton yield, we used hierarchical Bayesian models to analyze a large ecoinformatics database consisting o...

Precision Farming (PF) management strategies are commonly based on estimations of within-field yield potential, often derived from remotely-sensed products, e.g., Vegetation Index (VI) maps. These well-established means, however, lack important information, like crop height. Combinations of VI-maps and detailed 3D Crop Surface Models (CSMs) enable advanced methods for crop yield prediction. Thi...

The USDA established the National Organic Program (NOP) to develop national standards for organically produced agricultural products and establish an organic certification program as required by the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) passed by Congress in 1990. Organic crop production excludes conventional pesticides, petroleum – based fertilizers, and sewage sludge based fertilizers with some...

Soybean stubble is a potentially significant residue of a crop that has attained prominence as an important cash crop, high value food crop, and also as a soil ameliorative. Soybean culture in Australia is a fledgeling yet emerging industry with crop area totalling 68,000 ha in the 1983/84 season with some 80 percent of the crop grown in subtropical regions (Desborough et al. 1984). The potenti...

Maize and Indian mustard are significant crops in semi-arid climate zones of India. Improved water management requires precise scheduling of irrigation, which in turn requires an accurate computation of daily crop evapotranspiration (ETc). Daily crop evapotranspiration comes as a product of reference evapotranspiration (ET0) and the growth stage specific crop coefficients modified for daily var...

Pesticides have played very important roles against food shortages and plant diseases, and our modern life would be vastly different without their use. Weed infestation adversely affects crop production by reducing yields and decreasing market prices of the crop. For cost-effective land use, crop yield and price must be maximized, and the cost of weed control minimized. Herbicides substantially...

Suggested citation IARI (2012) Crop residues management with conservation agriculture: Potential, constraints and policy needs. Indian Foreword India being an agriculture-dominant country produces more than 500 million tons of crop residues annually. These residues are used as animal feed, for thatching of homes, and as a source of domestic and industrial fuel. A large portion of unused crop re...

Justifiable usage of large-scale crop model simulations requires transparent, comprehensive and spatially extensive evaluations of their performance and associated accuracy. Simulated crop yields of a Pan-European implementation of the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) crop model were satisfactorily evaluated with reported regional yield data from EUROSTAT for four major crops, inc...

Remote sensing allows information to be obtained for a target crop by measuring the intensity of reflected electromagnetic energy. By assessing the reflectance of various wavelengths within the electromagnetic spectrum, a “spectral signature” for the crop can be established. The signature will depend on the characteristics and condition of the crop. Image processing software can be used to iden...