There is a long-standing trade-off in bioculture between concentrating on high-yield varieties and maintaining sufficient diversity to lower the risks of catastrophic infection. The paper uses a simple ecology-based model of endogenous disease to indicate how a local decision to plant more of a widely grown crop creates negative externalities by increasing the probability that new pathogens wil...

Smallholder agriculture involves millions of farmers worldwide. A methodical utilization of their traditional knowledge in modern breeding efforts may help the production of locally adapted varieties better addressing their needs. In this study, a combination of participatory approaches, genomics, and quantitative genetics is used to trace the genetic basis of smallholder farmer preferences of ...

Effect of seed ageing on stand establishment, growth and yield of three soybean varieties was studied. Treatments consisted of three varieties viz. Shohag, Bangladesh soybean 4 and BARIsoybean-5 with four levels of seed ageing viz. 20, 12, 8 and 2 months aged seed. Seed germination and field emergence percentage decreased but electrical conductivity of seed leachate increased with increasing se...

this research was carried out to evaluate the effects of some morphophysiological traits on white sugar yield of 10 commercial sugar beet (beta vulgaris l.) varieties. all experiments were conducted in four important sugar beet growing areas in iran, i.e. moghan, khoy, karaj and zarghan in 2006 and 2007. the experiment was arranged as a randomized complete block design with three replications i...

The most frequently overlooked aspect of conservation of natural resources and economic development is human cultural diversity. However, conservation and development of natural resources are basically human-oriented endeavors and all conservation and developmental efforts ought to start with a clear understanding of the varied needs of the people. In addition, cultural diversity is a natural r...

BACKGROUND Artificial selection results in phenotypic evolution. Maize (Zea mays L. ssp. mays) was domesticated from its wild progenitor teosinte (Zea mays subspecies parviglumis) through a single domestication event in southern Mexico between 6000 and 9000 years ago. This domestication event resulted in the original maize landrace varieties. The landraces provided the genetic material for mode...

Salinity stress is a major abiotic factor that affects crop output, and as a pioneer crop in saline and alkaline land, salt tolerance study of cotton is particularly important. In our experiment, four salt-tolerance varieties with different salt tolerance indexes including CRI35 (65.04%), Kanghuanwei164 (56.19%), Zhong9807 (55.20%) and CRI44 (50.50%), as well as four salt-sensitive cotton varie...

We develop and estimate a discrete-choice model of differentiated products for the corn and soybean seed industry in the United States to assess the welfare impact of genetically engineered (GE) crop varieties. We use a unique dataset, spanning the period 1996-2011, that contains rich information on the adoption of GE traits. Using a two-level nested logit model, we estimate that U.S. farmers a...