All agricultural producers face recurring risks, significant among them being production risk. Many factors contribute to production risk, including adverse weather conditions such as drought or floods, fires, insects or pests, and disease. These events can devastate a crop, significantly reducing yield and farmer revenue. Since the only way to completely avoid all production risks is to stop p...

Data mining applications in agriculture is a relatively new approach for forecasting / predicting of agricultural crop/animal management. In the present study an attempt has been made to study the influence of climatic parameters on soybean productivity using decision tree induction technique. The findings of Decision tree were framed into different rules for better understanding by the end use...

U.S. Rep. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, has introduced a leading contender in the 1995 farm bill debate. Under the Freedom to Farm Act (FFA), farmers who have participated in farm programs during three of the past five years would be eligible to enter into a sevenyear contract with the federal government. Through these contracts, farmers would receive an ...

This paper analyzed dynamics of crop diversification in one of the agriculturally prosperous districts of Indian Punjab using Gibbs Martin Index. Spatio-temporal analysis of crop diversification in the district shows decline in crop diversification in most of the blocks (administrative sub divisions). The cropping pattern in most of the blocks of the district has become over specialized in the ...

Wild bees provide a free and potentially diverse ecosystem service to farmers growing pollination-dependent crops. While many crops benefit from insect pollination, soft fruit crops, including strawberries are highly dependent on this ecosystem service to produce viable fruit. However, as a result of intensive farming practices and declining pollinator populations, farmers are increasingly turn...

This article presents an integrated ecologic and economic model to study landscape and land use change, using the Spatial Analysis Modelling Tool (SAMT). The study involves integrating these models to analyse landscape and land use changes in Quillow region of North East Germany. Different price and premium scenarios were implemented to indicate the likely effect of policy change. Results of th...

agricultural extension workers’ service has been placed as the central pattern of agricultural transformation in general and smallholder farmers in particular. due largely to this commensurately known trend, identifying factors that determine farmers’ access to extension workers’ service and the effect of the service on crop yield was found to be imperative. cross sectional data was collected t...

Preservation of biodiversity, and particularly agricultural biodiversity, has been recognized as being critical to sustaining productive ecosystems, and has been suggested as a viable strategy to promote adequate human nutrition and food security (1). In sub-Saharan Africa, farm sizes are generally small, have been declining and are expected to continue to decline over the next decades. At the ...

This paper examines the effect of pastoralist-farmers conflict on access to resources in savanna area of Oyo state, Nigeria. A snow ball technique was used to obtain a list of agro-pastoralists and their camps in the study area whose conflicts with crop farmers were caused by the nomadic pastoralists’ uncontrolled grazing. Fifty percent of the households in each camp were randomly chosen and si...