Peasant agriculture has been neglected as modern farming occupied its space in the production of basic foods. Exclusion of smallholders in LDCs is the outcome of declining prices for basic foods now produced and marketed globally by developed countries. This is an effect of globalization: it responds to advances in information technologies, communications, and biotechnology. Productivity gains ...

High levels of production in intensive farming systems are associated with increased replacement rates as a result of multifactorial diseases. The so-called "production diseases" may include low-grade infection reducing profitability without increased morbidity. Such infections are sustained by low pathogenic viral and bacterial agents which give rise to full-blown disease in association with p...

Some of the problems for the New Zealand sheep industry over the next decade are outlined, as are the changes necessary to overcome them. The future for the next generation of intensive sheep farmers should be promising if they can co-operate to realise the potential of genetics for flock improvement, be adaptable, overcome the problems of drench resistance and chemical and drug residues, incre...

INTRODUCTION An excess of nitrates causes environmental pollution in receiving water bodies and health risk for human, if contaminated water is source of drinking water. The directive 91/676/ CEE [1] aims to reduce the nitrogen pressure in Europe from agriculture sources and identifies the livestock population as one of the predominant sources of surplus of nutrients that could be released in w...

To reduce the environmental burden of agriculture, suitable methods to comprehend and assess the impact on natural resources are needed. One of the methods considered is the life cycle assessment (LCA) method, which was used to assess the environmental impacts of 18 grassland farms in three different farming intensities — intensive, extensified, and organic — in the Allgäu region in southern Ge...

Executive Summary 3 1: Introduction 9 2: Factors causing bee declines – implications for agriculture 15 3: Ecological farming versus industrial agriculture – impacts on bees 21 4: Ecological pest control to eliminate the use of synthetic chemical pesticides 39 Appendix 1 54 Appendix 2 56 3 The drastic decline of wild and managed bee populations recorded in recent years in Europe and North Ameri...

Fish farming has seriously influenced the aquatic environment in Sancha reservoir in SW China since 1985 and has been strongly restricted since 2005. Thus, phosphorus speciation in a sediment core dated between 1945 and 2010 at cm-resolution and in surface sediments from Sancha reservoir may allow us track how fish farming impacts phosphorus dynamics in lake sediments. Fish farming shifts the m...

Scheduling problems for general cases are characterized as NP hard, and the computation time required to obtain the optimal schedule will grow exponentially with the problem size. The scheduling problems that consider the limited or shared resources, alterable constraints or environmental changes become very complex in both formulation and solution. Since the solution for these problems has gre...

Spinal deformities in farmed Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are often observed in intensive farming systems and result in production losses. Many putative factors have been implicated with the formation of spinal deformities in larger salmon. This condition has been described as broken back syndrome, curvy back disease, and short tails.