Parthenium sp. is a noxious weed which threatens the environment and biodiversity due to its rapid invasion. This lignocellulosic weed was investigated for its potential in biofuel production by subjecting it to mild alkali pretreatment followed by enzymatic saccharification which resulted in significant amount of fermentable sugar yield (76.6%). Optimization of enzymatic hydrolysis variables s...

A three years study on precision farming in cotton in central Greece showed serious infield variability of yield and soil physical and chemical properties. Yield mapping constitutes the starting and ending point of the whole process chain in a precision farming system. Yield mapping was performed for three consecutive years in the same cotton fields of central Greece in a wide range of cotton v...

in order to study the possibility of intercropping of basil and sesame, an experiment was carried out in a randomized complete block design with three replications at the sari agricultural sciences and natural resources university during growing season of 2009-2010. treatments consisted of different planting ratio, p1: sole cropping of basil, p2: 75% basil+ 25% sesame, p3: 50% basil+ 50 % sesam...

Research has revealed that mechanical expression process could substantially improve the yield and quality of groundnut oil. In this study, experiments were carried out to study the effects of heating temperature and seed condition on the yield and quality of oil extracted from groundnut by mechanical means. The physiochemical analysis of the oil extracted was also determined. Samples of 3kg ma...

With the objective of evaluating measures of milk yield persistency, 27,000 test-day milk yield records from 3362 first lactations of Brazilian Gyr cows that calved between 1990 and 2007 were analyzed with a random regression model. Random, additive genetic and permanent environmental effects were modeled using Legendre polynomials of order 4 and 5, respectively. Residual variance was mod...

Soil erosion from agricultural lands can be reduced by adoption of conservation management practices. The objectives of this study were to investigate the effectiveness and cost-benefit of conservation management practices on sediment reduction under a corn–soybean rotation. The experimental site was 6.4 ha (15.8 ac) and located within the Four Mile Creek watershed in eastern Iowa. Management p...

Canopy chlorophyll density (Chl) has a pivotal role in diagnosing crop growth and nutrition status. The purpose of this study was to develop Chl based models for estimating N status and predicting grain yield of rice (Oryza sativa L.) with Leaf area index (LAI) and Chlorophyll concentration of the upper leaves. Six field experiments were conducted in Jiangsu Province of East China during 2007, ...

Coffee can be cultivated under various management schemes from heavy shade to full sun. Higher yields are generally achieved in full sun but often at the expense of smaller beans and greater requirements for water and nutrients. We compared growth, yield, bean size, and total value in a coffee agroecosystem in Hawaii grown in full sun or at two shade levels (30 and 50%) under Leucaena variety K...

Agricultural waste cow dung was used as feedstock for the production of a high value-added chemical levulinic acid (LA) in dilute acid aqueous solutions. A high LA yield of 338.9 g/kg was obtained from the pretreated cow dung, which was much higher than that obtained from the crude cow dung (135 g/kg), mainly attributed to the breakage of the lignin fraction in the lignocellulose structure of t...

slurries of rice-straw cellulose (obtained by delignification and removal of hemicelluloses from the powdered raw material) were subjected to ultrasonic waves at different intensities for various times (constant temperature). susceptibility of the samples to cellulose-hydrolysis increased initially with pretreatment time, reaching a maximum or a constant level thereafter. maximum glucose yield ...