Interest in oilseeds and oilseed crop production has recently been heightened by the growing potential for biofuels. Traditional oil seed crops, such as sunflower (Helianthus annuus L., Asteraceae), flax (Linum usitatissimum L., Linaceae), and more recently canola (Brassica napus L., Brassicaceae) have become crops of major importance in the region. The key to their production success is multi-...

Shrinking arable land due to soil salinization and, depleting fresh water resources pose serious worldwide constraints to crop productivity. A vision of using plant feedstock for biofuel production can only be realized if we can identify alternate species that can be grown on saline soils and therefore, would not compete for the resources required for conventional agriculture. Halophytes have r...

Biotech crops have now been grown commercially on a substantial global scale since 1996. This paper examines the production effects of the technology and impacts on cereal and oilseed markets through the use of agricultural commodity models. It analyses the impacts on global production, consumption, trade and prices in the soybean, canola and corn sectors. The analysis suggests that world price...

Background. Up to 75% of crop species benefit at least to some degree from animal pollination for fruit or seed set and yield. However, basic information on the level of pollinator dependence and pollinator contribution to yield is lacking for many crops. Even less is known about how insect pollination affects crop quality. Given that habitat loss and agricultural intensification are known to d...

Plant storage compounds such as starch and lipids are important for human and animal nutrition as well as industry. There is interest in diverting some of the carbon stored in starch-rich organs (leaves, tubers, and cereal grains) into lipids in order to improve the energy density or nutritional properties of crops as well as providing new sources of feedstocks for food and manufacturing. Previ...

Oil palm has become one of the most important crops in the world with questions being raised about its economic and environmental sustainability. Agricultural systems models are regularly employed in studying sustainable crop management but no detailed model is currently available for oil palm systems. We developed a production systems model for oil palm within the Agricultural Production Syste...

Oil palm trees are important economic crops in Malaysia and other tropical areas. The number of oil palm trees in a plantation area is important information for predicting the yield of palm oil, monitoring the growing situation of palm trees and maximizing their productivity, etc. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework for oil palm tree detection and counting using high-resol...

G lobally, vegetable oils are harvested from a handful of oil crops at an annual rate exceeding 100 million tons (1). Most oils are used for human or animal consumption, although a minor fraction is derivatized to oleochemicals. More recently, an increasing amount of vegetable oil is being diverted to the production of biodiesel [i.e., fatty acid (FA) methylesters], and is an attractive feedsto...

1 Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) is native to North America. American natives first cultivated sunflower 5000 yr ago in the present-day southwest United States (Semeslczi-Kovacs, 1975). Sunflower spread to the north and east in North America, where it was domesticated 4000 yr ago (Blackman et al., 2011). Sunflower is a relatively new commercial crop to the United States, with commercial culti...

crops include oil crops, vegetables, condi-ments, fodder crops, and ornamental plants. Most of these crops belong to or are closely related to the genus Brassica. The Brassicaceae also includes the most intensively studied model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana. In molecular genetic studies of Brassicaceae crops, information on A. thaliana genes is highly useful, and many genes important for plant b...