Agriculture, Volume 12, Issue 2

The large amount of nitrogen application on the North China Plain has caused a serious negative impact on the sustainable development of regional agriculture and ecological environmental protection. Our aim was to explore the effects of nitrogen fert...

Apple, which occupies the first position in the world with regard to its yield, is an important economic crop in China. Pruning of apple trees is still dominated by manual pruning, resulting in high labor costs and low efficiency. Additionally, there...

Smart farming uses advanced tools and technologies such as intelligent agricultural machines, high-precision sensors, navigation systems, and sophisticated computer systems to increase the economic benefits of agriculture and reduce the associated hu...

Feeding a growing global population requires improving agricultural production in the face of multidimensional challenges; and digital agriculture is increasingly seen as a strategy for better decision making. Agriculture and agricultural supply chai...

Resistant starch (RS) shows several health benefits. Enhancing the RS content of wheat is of major commercial importance. However, knowledge regarding the RS synthesis mechanism in wheat remains limited. In this study, the dynamic accumulation of RS...

Wheat, an important cereal crop, is responsible for the livelihoods of many people, and a component of national food security. Tillering, which determines plant architecture and spike number, is a critical agronomic trait of wheat. The carotenoid cle...

The conversion of grasslands to croplands is common in the agro-pastoral ecotone and brings potential risks to soil health and environmental safety. As the forming unit of soil structure, the status of soil aggregates determines soil health and is af...

Biotechnological advances in animal health and nutrition continue to play a significant role in the improvement of animal health, growth, and production performance. These biotechnological advancements, especially the use of direct-fed microbials, al...

The main objective of this study was to analyze variable rate seeding (VRS) methods and critically evaluate their suitability and effectiveness for the challenges under field conditions. A search was performed using scientific databases and portals b...

Considering hydro-climatic diversity, integrating dynamic dimensions of water security modeling is vital for ensuring environmental sustainability and its associated full range of climate resilience. Improving climate resiliency depends on the attrib...

Farmers and consultants face an unmanageable amount of diverse knowledge and information for crop management decisions. To determine optimal actions, decision makers require knowledge-based support. In this way, decisions can be improved and heuristi...

Our study analyzed the ruminal fermentation and microbiome, hematological profile, and abomasal histopathology of lambs experimentally infected with a gastrointestinal nematode (GIN) and fed sainfoin pellets (SFPs; 600 g DM/d/animal) for 14 d. Twenty...

Plant diseases are a major concern in the agricultural sector; accordingly, it is very important to identify them automatically. In this study, we propose an improved deep learning-based multi-plant disease recognition method that combines deep featu...

The root system connects the plant with the soil, which is a key factor in determining the utilization of soil resources and plant growth potential. Solar radiation can change maize shoot and root growth and affect grain formation. In this study, the...

The evolution of target pest population resistance to Bt toxins is the most relevant threat to the sustainability of Bt technology, thus it is necessary to clarify insect resistance mechanisms. Firstly, the resistance level of Asian corn borer was de...

China’s sustainable development goals and carbon neutrality targets cannot be achieved without revolutionary transitions of the agricultural sector. The rapid development of digital technologies is believed to play a huge role in this revolutio...

Agriculture is a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions. Approximately 1/3 of vegetables in China are produced in greenhouses. However, the effects of different irrigation strategies and plastic film (PF) mulching combinations on N₂O emissio...

The current study was conducted to estimate the carbon (C) storage status of agroforestry systems, via a non-destructive strategy. A total of 75 plots (0.405 ha each) were selected by adopting a lottery method of random sampling for C stock estimatio...

From 2018 to 2020, surveys of oomycetes associated with root and crown rot of almond (Prunus dulcis) were conducted on diseased young almond trees in commercial orchards and nurseries in six provinces of Spain. A total of 104 oomycete isolates w...

Due to the increasing biomass of biowaste it is necessary to manage it rationally. This work presents comparisons and valorization of vermicomposts (VCs) and composts (Cs) prepared from various biowastes generated in households and private gardens, i...

Tractors are prone to large slips when they are in field operation. The degree of slip plays a vital role in traction efficiency and fuel efficiency. This paper presents a method for measuring the slip ratio of tractors in field operation based on ma...

Increasing sustainability in agriculture is an imperative target for whole food and feed production and transformation chains [...]

Morphological and simple sequence repeat (SSR) approaches were used to determine the genetic diversity of 29 ryegrass (Lolium rigidum) genotypes belonging to eight populations collected from several regions in Saudi Arabia. In this study, 50 in Silic...

Bactericides, fungicides, and other pesticides play an important role in the management of plant diseases. However, their use can result in residues on plants and in the environment, with potentially detrimental consequences. The use of streptomycin,...

Agricultural mechanization is essential to increase farmers’ income in modern agriculture. However, the use of machinery for crop production in China is quite inefficient. To understand the obstacles limiting farmers’ use of machinery, we...

Globally, there is a strong interest in on-farm pesticide use culture due to genuine concerns about the individual, public, and ecological health risks posed by pesticides. At farm scale, pesticide use culture can be captured via the assessments of k...

To simulate the interactions between a pneumatic cotton precision seed-metering device and coated delinted cotton seeds accurately, physical and simulation experiments based on a rotating drum apparatus were combined to calibrate the discrete element...

Plum fruit and kernels offer bioactive material for industrial production. The promising procedure for distinguishing plum kernel cultivars used in this study comprised two stages: image analysis to compute the texture parameters of plum kernels belo...

Accurate identification and intelligent counting of pig herds can effectively improve the level of fine management of pig farms. A semantic segmentation and counting network was proposed in this study to improve the segmentation accuracy and counting...

The cultivation of medicinal plants represents great necessity and topicality these days, given that the pharmaceutical industry requires high quality raw materials in large quantities. Those are used for the production of food supplements/phytomedic...

In this paper, an adaptive header height control system is designed. Through the influence of the natural frequency, ${\omega }_n$, and damping ratio, $\zeta$, on the system’s dynamic index, the optimal hydraulic cylinder parameters are determined co...

Opuntia species exhibit beneficial properties when used to treat chronic diseases, particularly obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer; however, the presence of spines and glochids in the species’ skin that easily stick into cons...

System dynamics and agent-based simulation modelling approaches have a potential as tools to evaluate the impact of policy related decision making in food value chains. The context is that a food value chain involves flows of multiple products, finan...

Tangolagrass (Brachiaria arrecta × Brachiaria mutica) is a stoloniferous warm-season grass considered as an alternative to forming permanent grasslands in waterlogged tropical regions. However, information about grazing management targets for s...

Jujube girdling is an important method to improve the yield and quality of jujube fruit. However, girdling usually causes the tearing of jujube bark, resulting in the slow healing and even death of jujube trees. These problems directly affect the eco...

Feed costs are the largest expense in commercial beef production. Increasing cattle (Bos taurus) feed efficiency should reduce feed costs and increase beef profitability. This study used data from two years of a backgrounding trial conducted in Lacom...

Imputation can be used to obtain a large number of high-density genotypes at the cost of procuring low-density panels. Accurate imputation requires a well-formed reference population of high-density genotypes to enable statistical inference. Five met...

Access to feed for livestock during the cropping season is a constraint to the smallholder crop–livestock farming system in northern Ghana due to backyard farming. A two-year (2017–2018) study was conducted to determine the effect of leaf...

Self-incompatibility (SI) is present in around half of all species of flowering plants. SI limits endogamy and contributes to increased genetic diversity. SI is a very important trait in citrus because, when coupled with parthenocarpy, it allows seed...

Many effects of polyamines (PAs) are well known in plant developmental processes; however, the significance of their catabolism is not well understood. Copper amine oxidase (CuAO) is involved in the degradation of diamine putrescine (Put). The genoty...

Complete diets for laying hens are usually offered in meal form. This form initially promotes the laying hens’ natural feed intake behavior and allows them to satisfy their pecking behavior. At the same time, it can also cause difficulties, bec...

Agriculture is a major anthropogenic source of the greenhouse gas N₂O, which is also involved in stratospheric ozone depletion. While the use of rhizobial inoculants has already been reported as an emerging option for mitigating soil N₂O emissions, t...

Chemical dormancy breakers are often used to manipulate floral bud break in sweet cherry production, and their use is increasing due to unpredictable climate effects. The role of plant hormones in regulating the critical transition of floral buds fro...

Soil aeration and plastic film mulching have been reported to accelerate plant growth and increase fruit yield by improving the rhizosphere soil–air environment. The aim of this study was to investigate plant growth, fruit yield, irrigation wat...

Soil microorganisms are key drivers of soil biochemical processes, but the resilience of microbial communities and their metabolic activity after an extreme environmental change is still largely unknown. We studied structural (bacterial and fungal co...

In this paper, a deep-learning model is proposed as a viable approach to optimize the information on soil parameters and agricultural variables’ effect in cotton cultivation, even in the case of small datasets. In this study, soil is analyzed t...

Grass was ensiled using an acid-based additive (AS) or homofermentative lactic acid bacteria (IS). In addition, barley grain was either dried (DB) or crimped and ensiled (EB). The feeds were fed as total mixed rations (TMR) in a 2 × 2 factorial...

Fertilization practices change soil organic carbon content and distribution, which is relevant to crop rotation and soil aggregates. However, how fertilization management under corn–soybean rotation affects soil organic carbon and aggregate sta...

Conventional redesign methodologies applied on the grain harvester headers for the mechanical harvesting of chickpeas cause its progress to not be as rapid and technological. This paper presents a hybrid modeling-optimization methodology to design ha...

Lupins are an important source of domestic protein in many countries, and are often considered as an alternative to soybeans, given their elevated and high-quality protein content, suitability for sustainable production and consumer acceptability. Th...