Agriculture, Volume 16, Issue 3

Sichuan Pepper is a high-value spice, but traditional drying often degrades its unique flavor and quality. This study investigates the applicability of contact ultrasound-assisted hot air drying (US-HAD) to address these issues. The effects of drying...

Soil nutrient analyzers are integral to precision agriculture, yet their adoption among smallholder farmers remains uneven. This study investigates the behavioral determinants of farmers’ adoption intention toward soil nutrient analyzers by ext...

Real-world dairy farming datasets are often noisy (e.g., missing or corrupted sensor signals) and contain only short labeled sequences, making conventional correlation analysis and feature prioritization unreliable. We present a robust learning frame...

The optimal timing of chemical defoliation is a critical bottleneck in stabilizing yield and fiber quality for short-season cotton, particularly under the intensifying pressure of mechanized global production. Current practices rely heavily on popula...

In the poultry industry, measures related to combating antimicrobial resistance have accelerated the search for safe and effective alternatives capable of sustaining production while limiting the spread of pathogens in livestock farms. Among these, p...

Enhancing crop diversity is a key pillar of the EU’s 2023–2027 CAP eco-schemes, yet Poland’s long-standing crop simplification raises doubts about the policy’s effectiveness. This study assesses the determinants of crop struct...

This study assessed the technical capacity and specific support needs of 28 small, medium, and community cassava processing centers across the Ruzizi Plain, Kinshasa, and Kongo Central Provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A rapid appraisal...

This study developed an integrated vision–actuation system for precision weeding in indoor soil bin environments, with cabbage as a case example. The system integrates lightweight object detection, 3D co-ordinate mapping, path planning, and a t...

This study empirically investigates the impact and underlying mechanisms of farmers’ digital capability (DC) on large-scale farmland management, utilizing micro-survey data from 1144 rural households across five provinces in China: Anhui, Henan...

Stropharia rugosoannulata is efficiently cultivated using agricultural and forestry wastes, such as sawdust and straw, and has gained popularity in China for its rich nutrition and excellent taste. However, traditional cultivation methods, which lack...

In the absence of ex-post empirical evidence on the implementation effects of the EU-Mercosur agreement, assessments of expected risks and benefits for the agri-food sector must rely on ex-ante reasoning rather than statistical identification. This p...

Straw return plays a pivotal role in sustaining soil fertility and crop production, but the interaction between straw return and consecutive fertilizer applications on yield sustainability and soil quality under climate change are unclear. Therefore,...

During feedout, silage is exposed to air, promoting the growth of aerobic microorganisms that degrade its quality. Obligate heterofermentative lactic acid bacteria (LAB) can produce acetic acid, which enhances aerobic stability. Higher inoculation ra...

Feed stress is a very critical factor impacting livestock health and productivity. One of the major contributors to quantitative feed deficiency is the continued adherence to conventional diets and feeding practices, which renders livestock populatio...

It is largely acknowledged that the dairy industry faces momentous challenges to make progress toward major environmental goals in balance with economic and social sustainability. This study addresses this concern by examining the processes of sustai...

Soil phosphorus (P) deficiency is an important factor limiting plant growth in the semi-arid Loess Plateau region in China. The topsoils in this area undergo repeated drying–rewetting (DRW) cycles, which can influence soil P availability, a pro...

Sugarcane is an important economic crop, and key phenotypic traits such as plant height and leaf area play a crucial role in yield potential assessment and breeding selection. However, the quantification of these traits currently relies mainly on ine...

Regenerative agriculture (RA) offers a critical pathway for climate change mitigation and adaptation, yet its implementation is often hindered by conceptual ambiguity and a lack of standardized assessment frameworks. This study employs a comparative...

Pearl millet, an African-origin crop with exceptional heat tolerance, maintains normal flowering and seed production even under extremely high temperatures. The MADS-box transcription factor family plays a central role not only in floral organs, but...

Intensive pig production systems in China face dual challenges of heavy metal (HM) contamination and nutrient overloading from manure. However, stage-specific quantitative relationships between diet and excretion remain poorly characterized, hinderin...

Maize–soybean intercropping can improve land use efficiency and increase crop yields, thereby contributing to sustainable agricultural development. This study aimed to investigate the marginal effects of intercropping on dry matter accumulation...

Durum wheat productivity in Mediterranean regions faces growing challenges from drought and heat stress. Understanding the genetic architecture of diverse germplasm is therefore essential to support pre-breeding efforts and enhance stress adaptation....

Climate change induced by greenhouse gas emissions is currently one of the most important challenges of the world. Against this backdrop, we deeply explore the temporal variation characteristics of vegetable production in Guangdong Province, a major...

Navigation line extraction is essential for visual navigation in agricultural machinery, yet existing methods often perform poorly in complex environments due to challenges such as weed interference, broken crop rows, and leaf adhesion. To enhance th...

Detecting rice leaf diseases in real-world field environments remains challenging due to varying lesion sizes, diverse lesion morphologies, complex backgrounds, and the limited availability of high-quality annotated datasets. Existing detection model...

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) seed quality traits were evaluated to investigate the relative genetic and environmental contributions to their variation, the stability of genotypes across environments, and the interrelationships among traits. Fifteen ge...

Image enhancement can effectively improve the contrast, clarity, and information content of images, thereby improving visual quality. Image enhancement has significant application value in the process of identifying and diagnosing agricultural pests...

The aim of the study was to assess the effect of superabsorbents on the condition of selected legume species grown with different watering frequencies. Three two-factor pot experiments were conducted in MICRO-CLIMA phytotrons. The objects of the stud...

The transition to a circular bioeconomy enhances the valorization of agricultural by-products. Hawthorn leaves (Crataegus spp.), generated in large quantities from orchard maintenance, represent a promising yet underutilized biomass. This comprehensi...

This research was conducted on small farms in Republika Srpska, an entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Data were collected through direct interviews on five farms, each with 8–15 dairy cows, which at some point diversified their production from s...

The rapid expansion of greenhouse agriculture demands sustainable strategies to maintain soil health and productivity from the outset. Priestia megaterium, a plant growth-promoting rhizobacterium (PGPR), has shown promise in improving plant growth an...

Accurate, nondestructive assessment of fresh tea leaf quality is important for breeding and field management, yet most spectral work still targets processed or low-moisture products. Here, a mechanistically guided hyperspectral method was developed t...

Soil sensors have a vital role in precision agriculture. In smart agriculture, soil moisture sensors, soil temperature–humidity sensors, soil pH sensors, soil nutrient sensors, soil pollutant and pest sensors, and wearable sensors detect data t...

Genetically modified (GM) forage crops engineered to accumulate elevated levels of lipids offer potential benefits for ruminant nutrition and greenhouse gas mitigation. However, robust and reproducible workflows for producing, harvesting, and preserv...

Rice seed variety classification is crucial for seed quality control and breeding, yet practical deployment is often limited by the computational and memory demands of modern deep models. We propose SimpleEfficientCNN (SimpleEfficient: simple & e...

Livestock health knowledge graphs are essential for decision-making and reasoning in animal husbandry, yet existing knowledge is scattered across unstructured literature and encoded in narrowly scoped, species-specific models, resulting in semantic f...

The accurate detection and non-contact weight estimation of zucchini fruits are crucial for automated harvesting systems. This study presents a novel weakly supervised oriented object detection method for zucchini fruit recognition and weight predict...

Soil moisture sensors deployed for long-term monitoring often suffer from prolonged data gaps caused by battery depletion, communication dropouts, or hardware failures. When such gaps overlap with irrigation events, key transient phases are obscured...

This study investigated the effects of environmentally friendly soil amendments—processed red clay (PRC) and rice husk (RH)—on early establishment, growth characteristics, phytochemical accumulation, and soil chemical properties in wild-s...

Tea bud recognition and localization constitute a fundamental step toward enabling fine-grained tea plantation management and intelligent harvesting, offering substantial value in improving the picking quality of premium tea materials, reducing labor...

Kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus) is a versatile fiber crop known for rapid growth and high biomass productivity that is often cultivated in warm-season regions where root-knot nematodes (RKNs) are prevalent. Here, we compared eight kenaf genotypes with Hi...

With the advancement of cotton mechanized topping technology, deep learning-based methods for detecting cotton apical buds have made significant progress in improving detection accuracy. However, existing algorithms generally suffer from complex stru...

Intensive pig production generates significant emissions of ammonia (NH₃) and methane (CH₄), gases with both environmental and health impacts, primarily originating from slurry storage lagoons and their management. This study monitored a maternity pi...

Leaf litter accumulation in tea soil contributes to soil sickness due to increased soil acidification and the release of allelochemicals. Microbe-assisted vermitechnology-based decomposition of potentially hazardous metal (PHM) containing tea leaf li...

To address the problems of high unharvested rates and header loss rates in existing plot-breeding wheat harvesters, this study presents the design of a comb-type header for plot wheat harvesters. Based on the loss suppression mechanism during wheat h...

Accurate detection and segmentation of young ‘Yuluxiang’ pear fruits at the fruit thinning stage are crucial for the development of intelligent fruit thinning robots. To address the challenges in recognition and segmentation of young &lsq...

Pesticide use in agriculture can have negative collateral effects on the environment. In this study, two groups of treatments (G1 and G2) based on active substances (ASs) with different mobility were evaluated in order to determine pesticide residues...

The application of zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnONPs) in agriculture is expanding due to their biostimulant potential; however, their influence on plant chemical communication and associated microbial communities remains not fully characterized. This...

This study analyzed the phenotypic and internal fruit quality diversity of six superior Nai plum trees to provide detailed phenotypic profiles and preliminary relational hypotheses, supporting superior genotype re-selection for breeding. Using leaves...

Manganese (Mn) toxicity, commonly triggered by soil acidification, poses a significant threat to citrus production. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi can alleviate heavy metal stress, while their specific function and quantitative effectiveness in co...