The winter wheat/summer fallow rotation is the most common cropping system in eastern Oregon. It is used to store winter precipitation and control weeds. This cropping system, however, destroys soil organic carbon, reduces water infiltration and thus leads to soil erosion, and is not sustainable. Conservation tillage, annual cropping, and the introduction of alternative crops are ways to improv...

GOSSYM is a comprehensive crop growth model that has been continuously developed since the late 1970s and widely applied to assist cotton growers, crop consultants, and researchers. The state-of-art CWRF (Climate-Weather Research and Forecasting model) demonstrated skillful simulations of regional water and energy cycle processes that are keenly important to cotton growth. This study focuses on...

The Dutch sugar industry and sugarbeet research initiated the project SUSY (Speeding Up Sugar Yield) as a reaction to the reform of the European Union sugar regime. The project was aimed at softening the reform’s impact on grower income by improving their knowledge on raising sugar yield and identifying possible cost savings. From each sugarbeet growing region in The Netherlands, 26 pairs of ‘t...

In the North China Plain, groundwater tables have been dropping at unsustainable rates of 1 m per year due to irrigation of a double cropping system of winter wheat and summer maize. To reverse the trend, we examined whether alternative crop rotations could save water. Moisture contents were measured weekly at 20 cm intervals in the top 180 cm of soil as part of a 12-year field experiment with ...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of processing, i.e. heating (98 !C, 10 min), freezing (!20 !C) and freeze-drying on anthocyanins, carotenoids, and vitamin C in summer fruits and vegetables, i.e. cherries, nectarines, apricots, peaches, plums, carrots and red bell peppers. The commodities were collected from growers located in the Otago region (namely Cromwell, Roxburgh, Mo...

Weather during the 2004 growing season in the Midwest, along with improved plant genetics and farming practices, produced exceptionally high yields of all major crops with resulting record yields 10 to 25 percent above prior records, an exceptional increase. Record corn and soybean yields in Illinois and five other states had profound effects on crop prices, given the large foreign demand and t...

Standard nutritional advice for irrigated sugarcane in South Africa and Swaziland is based on soil sample analysis and threshold values that have been determined experimentally over many years with surface-applied fertilisers. Fertilisers are normally applied in solid form during the early stages of crop development and watered in by the next irrigation cycle. The increasing popularity of subsu...

In the mid 1980’s, management of Diamondback moth, Plutella xylostella (L.) (Lepidoptera: Plutellidae), in brassica vegetable crops was at crisis level with spray failures prevalent across the industry in Southern Queensland. Insecticide resistance to synthetic pyrethroids was identified in 1986, and resistance monitoring between 1988 and 1992 showed that problems also existed with carbamates, ...

This article aims to evaluate the effect of insurance on production, technical efficiency, and input use Italian specialised-quality grape growers. A panel instrumental variable stochastic frontier approach is applied over years 2008–2017 using data from Farm Accountancy Data Network. The results show requirement correct for endogeneity that stems adoption. Insurance has an enhancing production...

No-till cropping is an option for growers needing to reduce soil erosion in the Palouse annual-cropped region of the Pacific Northwest, which is well suited for wheat production. A 6-yr field study was conducted to determine optimum levels of fertilizer and herbicide inputs in a no-till continuous wheat crop production system. Three levels of nitrogen (N) and two weed management levels (WML) we...