The WOFOST simulation model is a tool for analysing the growth and production of field crops under a wide range of weather and soil conditions. Such an analysis is important first to assess to what extent crop production is limited by the factors of light, moisture and macro-nutrients, and second to estimate what improvements are possible. The theoretical concept of a production situation, as m...

A non-homogeneous hidden Markov model (NHMM) is used to make stochastic simulations of March–August daily rainfall at 10 stations over the southeastern United States, 1923–98. Station-average observed daily rainfall is prescribed as an input to the NHMM, which is then used to disaggregate the rainfall in space. These rainfall simulations are then used as inputs to a CERES crop model for maize. ...

Predicting impacts of climate change or alternative management on both food production and environment safety in agroecosystems is drawing great attention in the scientific community. Most of the existing agroecosystem models emphasize either crop growth or soil processes. This paper reports the latest development of an agroecosystem model (Crop-DNDC) by integrating detailed crop growth algorit...

We studied the relationships among 5-year radial (diameter and basal area) growth of red oak (genus Quercus, subgenus Erythrobalanus) crop trees and predictor variables representing individual tree vigor, distance-dependant competition measures, and distance-independent competition measures. The red oaks we examined are representative of the commercially and ecologically important oak species o...

J. KO 1*, G. PICCINNI 2, W. GUO 3 AND E. STEGLICH 4 1United States Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service, Agricultural Systems Research Unit, 2150 Centre Avenue, Building D, Suite 200, Fort Collins, CO 80526, USA 2Monsanto Company, 700 Chesterfield Parkway West, Chesterfield, MO 63017, USA 3South Plains Precision Ag, 2810 N. Quincy, Plainview, TX 79072, USA Blackland Research ...

This paper investigates the total factor productivity (TFP) performance of NWFP agriculture crop subsector from 1970 to 2004. It identifies the sources of growth of TFP growth and assesses TFP growth changes in agriculture crop sub-sector. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach is used to estimate the changes in the production frontier. The Malmquist productivity index has decomposed total fa...

There is a growing need to increase global crop yields, whilst minimising use of resources such as land, fertilisers and water. Agricultural researchers use ground-based observations to identify, select and develop crops with favourable genotypes and phenotypes; however, the ability to collect rapid, high quality and high volume phenotypic data in open fields is restricting this. This study dev...

This paper presents a method used in China Agriculture Remote Sensing Monitoring System (CHARMS) for automatically identifying crop planting areas and monitoring crop growth conditions at a large scale based on time-series of MODIS NDVI Datasets. In doing that, the characteristics of NDVI time series of spring wheat, spring maize, soybean and rice in Northeastern China were firstly analyzed to ...