Over 175 growers in each of six states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska, and North Carolina) were surveyed by telephone to assess their perceptions of the benefits of utilizing the glyphosate-resistant (GR) crop trait in corn, cotton, and soybean. The survey was also used to determine the weed management challenges growers were facing after using this trait for a minimum of 4 yr....

Our ability to manage gene flow within traditional agroecosystems and their repercussions requires understanding the biology of crops, including farming practices' role in crop ecology. That these practices' effects on crop population genetics have not been quantified bespeaks lack of an appropriate analytical framework. We use a model that construes seed-management practices as part of a crop'...

Crop productivity is improved by ecosystem services, including pollination, but this should be set in the context of trade-offs among multiple management practices. We investigated the impact of pollination services on coffee production, considering variation in fertilization, irrigation, shade cover, and environmental variables such as rainfall (which stimulates coffee flowering across all pla...

Meeting the projected global demand for food and fuel from corn systems while conserving natural resources and improving environmental quality can only be achieved by the intensification of existing corn systems. Yield analysis of the central U.S. Corn Belt indicates that there is a large exploitable yield gap for corn. Since 1999, we have been experimenting with optimizing corn management syst...

Developing the concept of soil quality may help identify the soil and crop management practices required for environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable agriculture. Objectives of this paper are (1) to review current efforts to define soil quality, (2) to discuss factors and processes which influence soil quality, (3) to identify, soil and crop management practices that affect proce...

Due to the important role of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in ecosystem functioning, determination of the effect of management practices on the AMF diversity in agricultural soils is essential for the sustainability of these agro-ecosystems. The objective of this study was to compare the AMF diversity in Prunus persica roots under two types of fertilisation (inorganic, with or without manu...

Microbial diversity can be used to assess the impact of agricultural practices on the long-term sustainability of cropping systems. The aim of this study was to investigate changes in soil bacterial diversity as a result of the impact of different soil tillage and crop rotation systems in an oxisol of southern Brazil. Bacterial diversity was examined in the 010 cm layer in two field experiments...

Water is the most production limiting factor for dryland cropping systems in semiarid Great Plains environments. Evaporation is responsible for the greatest amount of water loss and management practices such as notill have been adopted to reduce evaporative losses. Less is known about the magnitude of water loss due to runoff. An objective of this study is to estimate an expected range in rainf...

Cultural practices (CPs) can be harnessed for the management of foliar and soilborne diseases by creating an environment which is favorable for the crop and unfavorable for the pathogen. Certain CPs, e.g. flooding and sanitation, are used mainly for pest control while others, e.g. irrigation, can be used for both crop management and pest control. Some CPs, e.g. deep plowing, crop rotation, flam...