Over the past recent months, I have received dozens of requests from various stakeholders, who were concerned about the carbon footprint of human food and particularly its animal-based portion. Most of us know that the discussion regarding the carbon footprint of animal protein has gained regional, national, and international momentum. For example, some of Sweden’s fastfood chains now offer inf...

Environment conditions can be maintained by the computerized control systems, where the system can be operated manually or automatically. By 2020, it will prove to be the utmost necessity everywhere in the world, particularly for agriculture for field micro-climate control. Today, in agriculture, the net house technology is a proven technology for optimum agricultural yield with most minimum na...

For a large extent of historiography, the history of Spanish agriculture during the twentieth century is a story of success. However, this narrative has been built on monetary analysis, and it does not usually take into account the effects on rural society and agroecosystems. The aim of this paper is to analyze what has happened from a biophysical perspective to ascertain whether transformation...

Improved assessment methods for agriculture production systems are needed to identify the risks and opportunities related to global changes in climate, markets and policies, and the consequences of alternative options of coping with and mitigating the changes. This paper presents the AGRISIMU modelling framework developed for ex-ante assessment of alternative policy and management options meant...

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm that owes much of its allure to its simplicity and its high effectiveness in solving sophisticated optimization problems. However, since the performance of the standard PSO is prone to being trapped in local extrema, abundant variants of PSO have been proposed by far. For instance, Fuzzy Adaptive PSO (FAPSO) algorithms ...

Definition: Genetic engineering, recombinant DNA technology and biotechnology – the buzz words you may have heard often on radio or TV, or read about in featured articles in newspapers or popular magazines. It is a set of techniques that are used to achieve one or more of three goals: to reveal the complex processes of how genes are inherited and expressed, to provide better understanding and e...

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Agriculture, the main sector of the Ethiopian economy, accounts for 85% of total employment and is the backbone and mainstay of the economy (Pausewang et al., 1990). However, agricultural productivity is decreasing because of land degradation, particularly due to soil erosion. Hurni (1988) estimated that the extent of erosion from arable land in the highlands of Ethiopia averaged 42 tons/ha/yr....

Intensification of land use and urbanisation in New Zealand are compromising the quality of surface waters. Managing the environmental load of microbes from diffuse sources, such as agriculture, is particularly challenging. Microbial contamination of water is a complex area of environmental management, and our understanding of the subject is incomplete. Many different stakeholders are involved ...