Factors affecting forage production, quality, marketing, and utilization include urbanization; availability of crop production resources; approaches to environmental stewardship; and other social and economic forces. Two factors of particular interest are 1) availability of pesticides for use in alfalfa and other forage crops; and 2) new laboratory procedures for predicting forage nutritional v...

This volume brings together many contributions and aspects of functional-structural plant modelling. These last pages draw attention to three significant questions that may emerge while reading this book: (i) to what extent do these models address plant functions? (ii) what is the (future) role of these models in plant sciences? and (iii) how can the use of these models be enhanced? These quest...

Smallholder participation in agricultural markets in Mozambique has been historically very low. The majority of rural smallholders are subsistenceoriented, devote the majority of their labor and assets to agricultural activities and rely on crop production for over two thirds of their total household income. Household survey results indicate that the poorest 40% of smallholders sell very little...

For at least the past 8000 years, small-scale farmers in semi-arid environments have had to mitigate shortfalls in crop production due to variation in precipitation and stream flow. To reduce their vulnerability to a shortfall in their food supply, small-scale farmers developed short-term strategies, including storage and community-scale sharing, to mitigate inter-annual variation in crop produ...

Agriculture is one of several industries that face criticism today because of its impact on the environment. Pollution prevention technologies can go a long way toward addressing these concerns. They could also be beneficial to producers as they represent a move toward efficiency. The most common environmental pollutants from crop production are sediment, nutrients, and pesticides. This paper i...

Numerous animal rights and animal liberation theorists have concluded that nonhuman animals have moral standing and noninterference rights. Therefore, they say that humans are morally obligated to stop using animals for food, fiber, labor, and research. I disagree with that conclusion for at least 2 reasons. First, it has been suggested that food production models are possible using large herbi...

We summarize the findings of a recently completed study of the productivity impacts of international crop genetic improvement research in developing countries. Over the period 1960 to 2000, international agricultural research centers, in collaboration with national research programs, contributed to the development of "modern varieties" for many crops. These varieties have contributed to large i...

We present a stochastic two-population model that describes the migration and growth of semisedentary foragers and sedentary farmers along a river valley during the Neolithic transition. The main idea is that random migration and transition from a sedentary to a foraging way of life, and backwards, is strongly coupled with the local crop production and associated degradation of land. We derive ...

We model the economic incentives surrounding opium crop production in Afghanistan. Specifically, we examine the impact of eradication policies when opium is used as a means of obtaining credit, and when the crops are produced in sharecropping arrangements. The analysis suggests that when perfect credit markets are available, an increased risk of eradication will lead to less land being allocate...