At the core of farm management lies the issue of work organization that concerns the configuration of activities in space and time, the material requirements for their execution (resources, sensors), and the anticipated means to adapt or react to contingencies. At a more micro level work organization has also to deal with operational aspects: the conditions and manner in which one or more peopl...

Nematicides are used to control a wide variety of nematodes on many crops; unfortunately, oftentimes the control they provide is erratic. This erratic behavior is not always predictable and has been associated with chemical, physical, and biological degradation of nematicides. Their accelerated degradation is an agricultural problem that has been observed in crop monocultures and in other crop ...

By the turn of the century, American farmers and ranchers will be producing food and fiber through the application of highly sophisticated systems that involve a broad spectrum of relevant factors--from soil type, to options for fertilizer and pesticide use, to markets and other economic information. These systems will help farmers and ranchers better match land use to land capability, apply ne...

In this paper we develop a dynamic data-consistent way for estimating agricultural land use choices at a disaggregate level (district-level), using more aggregate data (regional-level). The disaggregation procedure requires two steps. The first step consists in specifying and estimating a dynamic model of land use at the regionallevel. In the second step, we disaggregate outcomes of the aggrega...

BACKGROUND Atrazine and other triazine herbicides are widely used in US maize and sorghum production, yet the most recent market-level assessment of the economic benefits of atrazine is for market conditions prevalent in the early 1990s, before commercialization of transgenic crops. Grain markets have changed substantially since that time; for example, the size of the US maize market increased ...

Pesticides including insecticides and miticides are primarily used to regulate arthropod (insect and mite) pest populations in agricultural and horticultural crop production systems. However, continual reliance on pesticides may eventually result in a number of potential ecological problems including resistance, secondary pest outbreaks, and/or target pest resurgence [1,2]. Therefore, implement...

Weeds are a major obstacle to successful crop production in organic farming. Producers may be able to reduce inputs for weed management by designing rotations to disrupt population dynamics of weeds. Population-based management in conventional farming has reduced herbicide use by 50% because weed density declines in cropland across time. In this paper, we suggest a 9-year rotation comprised of ...

With the increasing pressure on crop production from the evolution of herbicide resistance, farmers are increasingly adopting Integrated Weed Management (IWM) strategies to augment their weed control. These include measures to increase the competitiveness of the crop canopy such as increased sowing rate and the use of more competitive cultivars. While there are data on the relative impact of th...

A method is proposed to handle crop succession requirements when determining the cultivated areas of n crops for a planning period of T years. For each year, the decision variables represent the areas where a sequence of m crops is cultivated, m ≥ 1. Here, m + 1 is the length of the longest forbidden sequence of crops not containing any forbidden subsequences. The crop succession constraints ar...

The potential movement of transgenes from genetically modified crops to non-genetically modified crops via insect-mediated pollen dispersal has been highlighted as one of the areas of greatest concern in regards to genetically modified crops. Pollen movement depends sensitively on spatial and temporal variation in the movement of insect pollinators between crop fields. This study tested the deg...