Soil compaction of arable land, caused by heavy machinery constitutes a major threat to agricultural soils in industrialized countries. The degradation of soil structure due to compaction leads to decreased (macro-) porosity resulting in increased mechanical impedance, which adversely affects root growth and crop productivity. New crop cultivars, with root systems that are adapted to conditions...

Soil compaction is one of the main negative factors that limits plant growth and crop yield. Therefore, it is important to determine the soil resistance level and map it for the field to find solutions for the negative effects of the compaction. Nowadays, high powered communication technology and computers help us on this issue within the approach of precision agriculture applications. This stu...

Digging of geotechnical boreholes and soil resistance tests are time-consuming and expensive activities. Therefore selection of optimum number and suitable location of boreholes can reduce cost of their drilling and soil resistance tests. In this research, a model which is consisting of geo statistics model as an estimator and an optimized model is selected. The kriging calculates the variance ...

The three-dimensional finite difference method was used in this study to analyze the deformation and stresses of a passive pile under surcharge load extensively deep soft soil. A numerical model proposed verified by field test. horizontal displacements agreed well with results. This investigated pile-foundation soil interaction, transfer mechanism, excess pore water pressure (EPWP), resistance ...

Antibiotic resistance genes are typically isolated by cloning from cultured bacteria or by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification from environmental samples. These methods do not access the potential reservoir of undiscovered antibiotic resistance genes harboured by soil bacteria because most soil bacteria are not cultured readily, and PCR detection of antibiotic resistance genes depends...

Granular materials have a tendency to exhibit an arching effect by which the load is transferred from yielding parts to adjacent stationary parts. Retaining walls are among those structures that the soil arching plays an important role in the distribution of earth pressures. This paper briefly reviews the development of soil arching theory and its application to different geotechnical projects....

The vertical distribution of weed seeds in the soil is of fundamental importance because seedling emergence depends on seed depth. The lateral displacement of the earth during mouldboard ploughing contributes to the dispersal of the weeds inside the tilled field. In order to model vertical and lateral seed displacements during ploughing, an existing model describing soil particle movements for ...

field study was conducted at five villages of botswana namely, tsabong, tshane, mathathane, motlhabaneng and tsetsejwe during the periods of june to august 1999 and june to august 2000. the objective of the study was to assess and compare the soil physicochemical properties of soils at the five villages and to study the effect of cultivation on some soil physical properties. parameters measured...