Quantifying the exploitable gap between average farmer yields and yield potential (YP) is essential to prioritize research and formulate policies for food security at national and international levels. While irrigated maize accounts for 58% of total annual maize production in the Western U.S. Corn Belt, current yield gap in these systems has not been quantified. Our objectives were to quantify ...

Soil erosion has been a problem in agriculture since ancient times. The main impact of erosion on the soil is a loss of soil productivity because of decreased capacities in soil biological, chemical, and physical properties. Various researchers have reported reduced crop yields in eroded soils (Frye et al., 1982; Olson and Carmer, 1990; Chengere and Lal, 1995; Shaffer et al., 1995). This loss i...

Estimates of climate change impacts on global food production are generally based on statistical or process-based models. Process-based models can provide robust predictions of agricultural yield responses to changing climate and management. However, applications of these models often suffer from bias due to the common practice of re-initializing soil conditions to the same state for each year ...

Experiments comparing conventional and organic systems often report similar yields despite substantially higher weed abundance in the organic systems. A potential explanation for this observation is that weed– crop competition relationships differ between the two types of systems. We analysed weed and crop yield data from the Rodale Institute Farming Systems Trial (FST), which provides a unique...

) Monitoring crop condition and production estimates at the state and county level is of great interest to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducts field interviews with sampled fann operators and crop .. cuttings to obtain crop yield estimates at regional and state levels. NASS needs supplemental spa...

Cropping sequence diversification provides a systems approach to reduce yield variations and improve resilience to multiple environmental stresses. Yield advantages of more diverse crop rotations and their synergistic effects with reduced tillage are well documented, but few studies have quantified the impact of these management practices on yields and their stability when soil moisture is limi...

After three to four decades of substantial inlittle evidence of a trend, it is considered to crease, yields per acre of major U.S. crops aphave plateaued. The second objective is to pear to have tapered off. The average annual investigate whether a crop yield series, if rate of growth in crop yields' decreased trendless, is random or oscillatory and, if nonmarkedly from 2.7 percent for the 1950...

Mild moisture stress causes sucrose to be deposited preferentially in sugarcane stalks so that sucrose yields may be improved. The rule of thumb in the industry states that a crop should be dried off for the time it would take pan evaporation to equal twice the plant available water holding capacity of the soil in which the crop is rooted (or twice TAM). Despite this useful rule farmers often d...

Although the EPIC model has been widely used in agricultural and environmental studies, applications of this model may be limited in the regions where daily weather data are not available. In this paper, a stand-alone MODAWEC model was developed to generate daily precipitation and maximum and minimum temperature frommonthly precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature, and wet days. A case st...

BACKGROUND Reduction of child undernutrition is one of the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Achievement of this goal may be made more difficult in some settings by climate change through adverse impact on agricultural productivity. However, there is only limited quantitative evidence on the link between household crop harvests and child nutrition. We examined this link in a largely subsi...