Sweetpotato is the seventh most important food crop in the world. It is mainly used for human food, animal feed, and for manufacturing starch and alcohol. This crop, a highly heterozygous, generally self-incompatible, outcrossing polyploidy, poses numerous challenges for the conventional breeding. Its productivity and quality are often limited by abiotic and biotic stresses. Gene engineering ha...

Crop protection against destructive pests has been at the forefront of recent agricultural advancements. Rapid adaptive evolution has led to insects becoming immune to the chemicals employed to quell their damage. Insecticide resistance is a serious problem that negatively impacts food production, food storage, human health, and the environment. To make matters more complicated are the strict r...

laboratory and field experiments were conducted to determine the efficacy of some insecticides on the control of sarta longhorned beetle, aeolesthes sarta solsky adults and larvae. in the laboratory, three pairs of mated and non-oviposited adults were released on the logs of field elm, ulmus minor mill that had been treated with chlorpyrifos, carbaryl, permethrin or imidacloprid. in the field e...

a fundamental shift to a total system approach for crop management in greenhouses is urgently needed to resolve escalating economic and environmental consequences of long-lasting undesired effects of synthetic pesticides used in combating agricultural pests. the aim of this study was to examine a potential new approach i.e. microbial-based production system (mps) for greenhouse-grown peppers. f...

Many studies have supported the enemies hypothesis, which suggests that natural enemies are more efficient at controlling arthropod pests in polyculture than in monoculture agro-ecosystems. However, we do not yet have evidence as to whether this hypothesis holds true in peach orchards over several geographic locations. In the two different geographic areas in eastern China (Xinchang a town in t...

Acaricide is a pesticide designed to control harmful species of mites (Acari)1. In crop protection practices, acaricides are used against phytophagous mites, pests causing economic injuries to agricultural crops and ornamental plants. Until mid-twentieth century, in agroecosystems of low-level productivity, phytophagous mite populations usually stayed below economic injury levels, due to natura...