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"Crop"
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Are crop circles real?
\"Presents stories of crop circles, designs that appear in crop fields, often overnight. Examines the evidence of various explanations\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Genetic strategies for improving crop yields
The current trajectory for crop yields is insufficient to nourish the world’s population by 2050
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. Greater and more consistent crop production must be achieved against a backdrop of climatic stress that limits yields, owing to shifts in pests and pathogens, precipitation, heat-waves and other weather extremes. Here we consider the potential of plant sciences to address post-Green Revolution challenges in agriculture and explore emerging strategies for enhancing sustainable crop production and resilience in a changing climate. Accelerated crop improvement must leverage naturally evolved traits and transformative engineering driven by mechanistic understanding, to yield the resilient production systems that are needed to ensure future harvests.
Genetic strategies for improving the yield and sustainability of agricultural crops, and the resilience of crops in the face of biotic and abiotic stresses contingent on projected climate change, are evaluated.
Journal Article
Handbook to UFOs, crop circles, and alien encounters
\"The idea that aliens might visit our planet has gripped Earthlings for a long time. Extraterrestrials are popular in science fiction books, movies, and TV shows. UFO hunters of every kind are searching Earth, sky, and space for answers to the question: Are we along in the galaxy?\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Orphan crops
Food security is the main challenge in the developing world, particularly in the least developed countries. Orphan crops play a vital role in the food security and livelihood of resource-poor farmers and consumers in these countries. Like major crops, there are members of all food types—cereals, legumes, vegetables and root and tuber crops, that are considered to be orphan crops. Despite their huge importance for present and future agriculture, orphan crops have generally received little attention by the global scientific community. Due to this, they produce inferior yields in terms of both quantity and quality. The major bottlenecks affecting the productivity of these crops are little or no selection of improved genetic traits, extreme environmental conditions and unfavorable policy. However, some orphan crops have recently received the attention of the global and national scientific community where advanced research and development initiatives have been launched. These initiatives which implement a variety of genetic and genomic tools targeted major constraints affecting productivity and/or nutritional quality of orphan crops. In this paper, some of these initiatives are briefly described. Here, I provide key suggestions to relevant stakeholders regarding improvement of orphan crops. Concerted efforts are urgently needed to advance the research and development of both the major and orphan crops so that food security will be achieved and ultimately the livelihood of the population will be improved.
Journal Article
Improving crop production using an agro-deep learning framework in precision agriculture
Background
The study focuses on enhancing the effectiveness of precision agriculture through the application of deep learning technologies. Precision agriculture, which aims to optimize farming practices by monitoring and adjusting various factors influencing crop growth, can greatly benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) methods like deep learning. The Agro Deep Learning Framework (ADLF) was developed to tackle critical issues in crop cultivation by processing vast datasets. These datasets include variables such as soil moisture, temperature, and humidity, all of which are essential to understanding and predicting crop behavior. By leveraging deep learning models, the framework seeks to improve decision-making processes, detect potential crop problems early, and boost agricultural productivity.
Results
The study found that the Agro Deep Learning Framework (ADLF) achieved an accuracy of 85.41%, precision of 84.87%, recall of 84.24%, and an F1-Score of 88.91%, indicating strong predictive capabilities for improving crop management. The false negative rate was 91.17% and the false positive rate was 89.82%, highlighting the framework's ability to correctly detect issues while minimizing errors. These results suggest that ADLF can significantly enhance decision-making in precision agriculture, leading to improved crop yield and reduced agricultural losses.
Conclusions
The ADLF can significantly improve precision agriculture by leveraging deep learning to process complex datasets and provide valuable insights into crop management. The framework allows farmers to detect issues early, optimize resource use, and improve yields. The study demonstrates that AI-driven agriculture has the potential to revolutionize farming, making it more efficient and sustainable. Future research could focus on further refining the model and exploring its applicability across different types of crops and farming environments.
Journal Article
Corn : a global history
\"Originating in Mesoamerica 9,000 years ago, maize - or, as we know it, corn - now grows in 160 countries. In the New World, indigenous peoples referred to corn as \"Our Mother,\" \"Our Life,\" and \"She Who Sustains Us.\" Today, the United States is the world's leading producer of corn, and you can find more than 3,500 items in grocery stores that contain corn in one way or another - from puddings to soups, margarine to mayonnaise. In Corn: A Global History, Michael Owen Jones explores the origins of this humble but irreplaceable crop.\"--Back cover.
Book
Diversifying crop rotation increases food production, reduces net greenhouse gas emissions and improves soil health
Global food production faces challenges in balancing the need for increased yields with environmental sustainability. This study presents a six-year field experiment in the North China Plain, demonstrating the benefits of diversifying traditional cereal monoculture (wheat–maize) with cash crops (sweet potato) and legumes (peanut and soybean). The diversified rotations increase equivalent yield by up to 38%, reduce N
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O emissions by 39%, and improve the system’s greenhouse gas balance by 88%. Furthermore, including legumes in crop rotations stimulates soil microbial activities, increases soil organic carbon stocks by 8%, and enhances soil health (indexed with the selected soil physiochemical and biological properties) by 45%. The large-scale adoption of diversified cropping systems in the North China Plain could increase cereal production by 32% when wheat–maize follows alternative crops in rotation and farmer income by 20% while benefiting the environment. This study provides an example of sustainable food production practices, emphasizing the significance of crop diversification for long-term agricultural resilience and soil health.
Food production systems need to balance yield and sustainability. Here, the authors conduct 6 years long crop diversification field experiments in the North China Plain, showing that diversifying cereal monocultures with cash crops and legumes cand improve yield and reduce GHG emissions.
Journal Article
The role of genetics in mainstreaming the production of new and orphan crops to diversify food systems and support human nutrition
Especially in low-income nations, new and orphan crops provide important opportunities to improve diet quality and the sustainability of food production, being rich in nutrients, capable of fitting into multiple niches in production systems, and relatively adapted to low-input conditions. The evolving space for these crops in production systems presents particular genetic improvement requirements that extensive gene pools are able to accommodate. Particular needs for genetic development identified in part with plant breeders relate to three areas of fundamental importance for addressing food production and human demographic trends and associated challenges, namely: facilitating integration into production systems; improving the processability of crop products; and reducing farm labour requirements. Here, we relate diverse involved target genes and crop development techniques. These techniques include transgressive methods that involve defining exemplar crop models for effective new and orphan crop improvement pathways. Research on new and orphan crops not only supports the genetic improvement of these crops, but they serve as important models for understanding crop evolutionary processes more broadly, guiding further major crop evolution. The bridging position of orphan crops between new and major crops provides unique opportunities for investigating genetic approaches for de novo domestications and major crop ‘rewildings’.
Journal Article