The paper focuses on conservation agriculture (CA), defined as minimal soil disturbance (no-till, NT) and permanent soil cover (mulch) combined with rotations, as a more sustainable cultivation system for the future. Cultivation and tillage play an important role in agriculture. The benefits of tillage in agriculture are explored before introducing conservation tillage (CT), a practice that was...

Agricultural production relies heavily on manmade chemicals used as fertilizers and pesticides, and to regulate plant growth. Pesticides are released intentionally into the environment to control insects, weeds, plant diseases and other pests that affect crop or animal production, as well as to control insects that spread human diseases. Pesticides have a well-established role in agriculture an...

In this paper, we consider the effect of increasing the area of agricultural land under organic practises. We assumed that organic agriculture does not have effective means of pathogen control. We model pathogen dispersal with a diffusive logistic equation in which the growth/death rate is spatially heterogeneous. We find that if the ratio of the organic plots to conventional plots is below a c...

[1] Past land use changes have greatly impacted global water resources, with often opposing effects on water quantity and quality. Increases in rain-fed cropland (460%) and pastureland (560%) during the past 300 years from forest and grasslands decreased evapotranspiration and increased recharge (two orders of magnitude) and streamflow (one order of magnitude). However, increased water quantity...

This paper presents a broad overview of the global agri-food system, including the sectors of agricultural production, food processing and retailing. It contrasts the practices, technologies, knowledge forms and structures of the dominant agri-food system with a range of alternative agri-food initiatives, such as organic agriculture, fair-trade and food localization movements. A number of conce...

plant growth promoting bacteria with various mechanisms such as an increase in uptake and availability of nutrients can improve plant growth. in order to evaluate the effects of biofertilizers and vermicompost on quantitative characteristics and essential oil content of vegetative parts of summer savory, a field experiment was conducted during growing season of 2008- 2009 at agriculture researc...