C quality is important to fruit and vegetable growers, buyers, and handlers. °Brix readings indicate soluble solids content. Since soluble solids represent a product’s potential sweetness (an aspect of quality), °Brix readings can interest many throughout the value chain. Three steps are required to make effective use of °Brix readings: (1) obtain accurate representative values; (2) become fami...

Sweetpotato is the seventh most important food crop in the world. It is mainly used for human food, animal feed, and for manufacturing starch and alcohol. This crop, a highly heterozygous, generally self-incompatible, outcrossing polyploidy, poses numerous challenges for the conventional breeding. Its productivity and quality are often limited by abiotic and biotic stresses. Gene engineering ha...

The practice of adding organic amendments to crop soils is undergoing resurgence as an efficient way to restore soil organic matter content and to improve soil quality. The quantity and quality of the organic matter inputs affect soil physicochemical properties and soil microbiota, influencing different parameters such as microbial biomass and diversity, community structure and microbial activi...

Due to increasing land-use pressures, soil-quality assessment is in growing demand, thus a standard set of procedures to assign a soil quality index (SQI) would be beneficial. In this study, the effectiveness of different managements in upholding soil quality (for crop productivity) was compared using soil quality indicators incorporated systematically to determine a SQI. The managements includ...

Despite increased attention and demand for the adoption of agroforestry practices throughout the world, rigorous long-term scientific studies confirming environmental benefits from the use of agroforestry practices are limited. The objective was to examine nonpoint-source pollution (NPSP) reduction as influenced by agroforestry buffers in watersheds under grazing and row crop management. The gr...

despite the importance of forage quality to animal performance, the quality of barley as a feed and forage crop has not been taken into consideration as a selection criterion in its breeding programs. in order to map the genomic regions affecting barley forage quality, two experiments were conducted while employing 72 doubled haploid lines and their two parents (‘steptoe’ and ‘morex’), at the r...

Agricultural crop rotations have been shown to increase soil carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and microbial biomass. The mechanisms behind these increases remain unclear, but may be linked to the diversity of crop residue inputs to soil organic matter (SOM). We used a residue mixture incubation to examine how variation in longterm diversity of plant communities in agroecosystems influences decompositi...