Dry land farming in India accounts for 63% of the cultivated land of 144 million hectares. The crop production on these lands is dependent entirely on the natural precipitation, which is highly erratic in terms of spatial and temporal distribution during the crop-growing season. To address these problems, Government of India has accorded high priority to watershed approach for development of ra...

The arable land quality assessment system is developed with Visual C++ coupled with ArcGIS engine. The system can provide basic functions of geographic information system, for example, map browsing, overlay analysis, and spatial interpolation. The program has both single-factor evaluation module and comprehensive evaluation module, which evaluate the land quality by field sampling data and othe...

Recent issues of Plant Physiology have contained a marvelous series of essays dealing with issues and controversies that surround the introduction and use of crops developed through the application of recombinant DNA technologies and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). These articles have provided considerable insight and thoughtful analysis of some of the major issues related to this timely...

In the context of China’s trial fallow policy; the heavy metal pollution of farmland is addressed via field surveys in Hunan Province, where the fallow policy has been implemented, and in Jiangxi Province, where it has not been implemented. We measured and analyzed willingness to accept (WTA) using the contingent valuation method (CVM). The conclusions of this study are as follows: (1) Farmer a...

Failure to balance daily energy expenditure (DEE) with energy intake can have an impact on survival and reproduction, and therefore on the persistence of populations. Here we study the DEE of the European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), which is declining in the UK. We hypothesise that there is a gradient of suitable habitat for hedgehogs in rural areas, which is a result of fewer food resource...

The manipulation of plant and environmental microbiomes is becoming an increasingly popular tool to sustainably increase farm productivity for food and nutrient security (Singh and Trivedi, 2017). There are multiple drivers for the increasing focus on microbiome tools in agriculture, including the need for a substantial increase in food production from shrinking arable lands. For example, an in...