Recent energy security strategies, investment opportunities and energy policies have led to an escalation in biofuel consumption at the expenses of food crops and pastureland. To evaluate the important impacts of biofuels on food security, the food-energy nexus needs to be investigated in the context of its linkages with the overall human appropriation of land and water resources. Here we provi...

Phenotypic variation has been manipulated by humans during crop domestication, which occurred primarily between 3000 and 10000 years ago in the various centers of origin around the world. The process of domestication has profound consequences on crops, where the domesticate has moderately reduced genetic diversity relative to the wild ancestor across the genome, and severely reduced diversity f...

Production of both livestock and food crops are central priorities of agriculture; however, food safety concerns arise where these practices intersect. In this study, we investigated the public health risks associated with potential bioaerosol deposition to crops grown in the vicinity of manure application sites. A field sampling campaign at dairy manure application sites supported the emission...

Worldwide, herbicides remain the most efficient technology for large-scale weed control. Therefore, the widespread evolution of herbicide resistance in weed populations within intensive crop production systems is a major threat to the sustainability and profitability of cropping systems. The introduction of new herbicides and herbicide modes of action to replace those herbicides failing due to ...

We examine the impact of current and future climate on crop mixes over space in the US. We find using historical data that temperature and precipitation are among the causal factors for shits in crop production location and mixes, with some crops being more sensitive than others. In particular, we find that when temperature rises, cotton, rice, sorghum and winter wheat are more likely to be cho...

Drought stress is a dominant constraint to crop production. Breeding crops with adapted root systems for effective uptake of water represents a novel strategy to increase crop drought resistance. Due to complex interaction between root traits and high diversity of hydrological conditions, modeling provides important information for trait based selection. In this work we use a root architecture ...

Increasingly more studies are raising concerns about the increasing consumption of meat and the increasing amount of crops (cereals and oilseeds in particular) used to feed animals and that could be used to feed people. The evolution of this amount is very sensitive to human diets and to the productivity of feed. This article provides a 2050 foresight on the necessary increase in crop productio...

Knowing spatial patterns of functional microbial guilds can increase our understanding of the relationships between microbial community ecology and ecosystem functions. Using geostatistical modeling to map spatial patterns, we explored the distribution of the community structure, size, and activity of one functional group in N cycling, the denitrifiers, in relation to 23 soil parameters over a ...

Loss of suitable seminatural habitats and homogenization of crop types have led to the population decline of pollinating insects in farmland. As these insects support crop production, many practical efforts aim to sustain pollinator diversity which is especially challenging in intensively managed and homogeneous farmland. However, there are ongoing changes of the farmland toward its multifuncti...

Laboratory, growth chamber and multiyear field studies were conducted with prominent cropping systems of the subtropical northwestern states of India including rice–wheat, rice–mustard, rice–rapeseed, soybean– wheat, soybean–rapeseed, groundnut–wheat, and groundnut–sunflower by including legumes (moongbean, cowpea, sesbania, pigeon pea) to investigate the role of integrated nutrient management ...