Integrated pest management (IPM) is a method of reducing economic, human health, and environmental risks from pests and pest management strategies. There are questions about the long-term success of IPM programs in relation to continued use of pesticides in agriculture. Total pounds of pesticides applied is a mis-measure of the impact of IPM in agriculture. A more complete measurement of the lo...

Interest in using gypsum as a management tool to improve crop yields and soil and water quality has recently increased. Abundant supply and availability of flue gas desulfurization (FGD) gypsum, a by-product of scrubbing sulfur from combustion gases at coal-fired power plants, in major agricultural producing regions within the last two decades has attributed to this interest. Currently, publish...

Agro-meteorological index insurance can transfer the risks in the agricultural production, reduce the farmers' economic losses, and promote a sustainable development of agricultural production. However, traditional agricultural insurance with a single rate has the problems of the presence of adverse selection, the difficulty of determining premium rates and assessing the claims. As a new agricu...

In the Mediterranean region, climate and land use change are expected to impact on natural and agricultural ecosystems by warming, reduced rainfall, direct degradation of ecosystems and biodiversity loss. Human population growth and socioeconomic changes, notably on the eastern and southern shores, will require increases in food production and put additional pressure on agro-ecosystems and wate...

Any change in climate will have implications for climate-sensitive systems such as agriculture, forestry, and some other natural resources. With respect to agriculture, changes in solar radiation, temperature, and precipitation will produce changes in crop yields, crop mix, cropping systems, scheduling of field operations, grain moisture content at harvest, and hence, on the economics of agricu...

The sensitivity of agricultural productivity to climate has not been sufficiently quantified. The total factor productivity (TFP) of the US agricultural economy has grown continuously for over half a century, with most of the growth typically attributed to technical change. Many studies have examined the effects of local climate on partial productivity measures such as crop yields and economic ...

Many of the most nutritionally and economically important edible insects are those that are harvested from existing agricultural systems. Current strategies of agricultural intensification focus predominantly on increasing crop yields, with no or little consideration of the repercussions this may have for the additional harvest and ecology of accompanying food insects. Yet such insects provide ...

Official crop progress, condition and production estimates for the United States are responsibilities of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s, National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). In addition to weekly and monthly survey-based data, biweekly composite maps of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from the NOAA AVHRR sensor (1 km resolution) are produced by NASS’s Researc...

In sub-Saharan Africa rain-fed agriculture cropping system uses a limited agricultural technology, occupies more than 95% of cultivated land. The impact of meteorological drivers on crop yields, and, in addition, the effects of herbicide application on farm productivity were examined at two locations; with a 70km distance between them, El Mazmum and El Dali in semi-arid Sudan. For ten successiv...

Nitrification inhibitors (NIs) delay the oxidation of ammonium by soil microorganisms, maintaining a higher proportion of applied nitrogen (N) in the soil by preventing nitrate-N loss from leaching and gaseous N losses from nitrification and denitrification. Thus, a large number of studies have shown N fertilizers with NIs are more environmentally friendly. In contrast, there are only a lim...