Agricultural biogas plants based on energy crops gain more and more importance because of numerous energetic, environmental and agricultural benefits. In contrast to older biogas plants, the newest generation of biogas plants is equipped with modern ICA equipment and reliable machines/engines. In this paper, the authors present technical details and operational results of a modern full-scale ag...

The development of endophyte inoculants for agricultural crops has been bedevilled by the twin problems of a lack of reliability and consistency, with a consequent lack of belief among end users in the efficacy of such treatments. We have developed a successful research pipeline for the production of a reliable, consistent and environmentally targeted fungal endophyte seed-delivered inoculant f...

The abundant and widespread Common Starling (Sturnus vulgaris) is currently declining across much of Europe due to landscape changes caused by agricultural intensification. The proximate mechanisms causing adverse effects to breeding Starlings are unclear, hampering our ability to implement cost-efficient agri-environmental schemes to restore populations to former levels. This study aimed to sh...

In recent decades farmers in high-income countries and China and India have built up a large reserve of residual soil P in cropland. This reserve can now be used by crops, and in high-income countries the use of mineral P fertilizer has recently been decreasing with even negative soil P budgets in Europe. In contrast to P, much of N surpluses are emitted to the environment via air and water and...

Sameer is a farmer who subsists on three acres in rural India. While much of the land is fertile, nearly 50% of his income goes towards just the interest payments from money-lender loans, loans which are necessary to finance the crops he plants. Moreover, some of his land is unused because he cannot profitably finance irrigation at the money-lender’s rates (5 to 10% per month). As a result, his...

In the EU-funded CROPS (Clever Robots for Crops) project high tech robots are developed for site-specific spraying and selective harvesting of fruit and fruit vegetables. The harvesting robots are being designed to harvest high-value crops such as greenhouse vegetables, fruits in orchards and grapes for premium wines. The CROPS robots are also developed for canopy spraying in orchards and for p...

In the framework of Geoland, Infoterra France has mapped with MERIS the distribution of annual crops surfaces in Belgium, Poland and Russia (Rostov oblast). The maps provided are the acreages of main groups of crops per administrative or agricultural circumscriptions unit. The groups are winter, spring and root crops (sugar beet, potatoes). The method for mapping exploits the MERIS capability t...

With this presentation, my role is to help to stir the discussion. Perhaps it will open the dialogue so that we have a sense of where we have been, where we are, and then what’s ahead. Figure shows a photograph from 986, and in Figure is a photograph taken two years later. We developed a tomato phenotype—viral coat-protein-mediated resistance to a common disease of tomato—with a technology that...