Mixed crop-livestock systems, combining livestock and cash crops at farm level, are considered to be suitable for sustainable intensification of agriculture. Ensuring the survival of mixed crop-livestock systems is a challenge for European agriculture: the number of European mixed crop-livestock farms has been decreasing since 1970. Analysis of farming system dynamics may elucidate past changes...

the greatest limitations to agricultural development and production in iran are scarcity of water resources, ineffective irrigation scheduling and wasteful water usage. avenues discussed for optimum water use include improving water productivity by improving irrigation scheduling, farm water management and water profitability. the present study evaluated current water use and ways to improve wi...

determination of crops water requirement in different environmental conditions is essential for preparation of precise and suitable irrigation scheduling. the effect of soil compaction and texture on crop coefficient and evapotranspiration of maize was investigated in this study, which was conducted as a factorial experiment with a completely randomized design in a research farm in jey and qaha...

a field experiment was conducted in order to study the effect of nitrogen fertilizer and plant density on yield and quality of maize (zea mays l.) cultivar, mv500 silage as second crop. this study was conducted in agricultural research station of kurdistan university during 2012 growing season. the experiment was laid out as split plot based on randomized complete block design with three replic...

Previous work has established that experienced male ring doves (Streptopelia risoria) can maintain prolactindependent crop growth and readiness to incubate by observing an incubating partner. We report that this is also true for female ring doves. The role of experience in this phenomenon was examined in separate experiments with males and females. Observation of an incubating mate from 3 days ...

The paper describes how stochastic optimization techniques can be used to model profit maximizing producer behaviour in a spatial continuum. The main methodological issues to be addressed are, first, that the representation of optimal allocations in a spatial continuum naturally leads to models that contain integrals over space, and the second that the resulting model tends to have a multi-leve...

Aflatoxins are potent mycotoxins that cause developmental and immune system suppression, cancer, and death. As a result of regulations intended to reduce human exposure, crop contamination with aflatoxins causes significant economic loss for producers, marketers, and processors of diverse susceptible crops. Aflatoxin contamination occurs when specific fungi in the genus Aspergillus infect crops...

With current trends of converting grasslands to row crop agriculture in vulnerable areas, there is a critical need to evaluate the effects of land use on groundwater quality in large river floodplain systems. In this study, groundwater hydrology and nutrient dynamics associated with three land cover types (grassland, floodplain forest and cropland) were assessed at the Cedar River floodplain in...