Since humans worldwide obtain more than 99.7% of their food (calories) from the land and less than 0.3% from the oceans and aquatic ecosystems, preserving cropland and maintaining soil fertility should be of the highest importance to human welfare. Soil erosion is one of the most serious threats...

Soil conservation is threatened by a number of factors, namely the effects of intensive agricultural practices, the increasing pressure for food production linked to the increasing human population, the consumption patterns in developed and emerging economies, and the conversion of agriculture...

This article is one of the first to carry out a non-parametric efficiency analysis of crop production in Uzbekistan. The study applies the bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to compute bias corrected technical efficiency (TE) scores using a sample of farms located in two regions of...

The origin of agricultural products is gaining in appreciation while often hard to determine for various reasons. Geographical origin may be resolved using a combination of chemical and physical analytical technologies. In the present case of Lily of the Valley (<i>Convallaria majalis</i>) rhizomes, we...

Subsistence Bhutanese farmers spread across different agro-ecological zones maintain large species and varietal diversity of different crops in their farm. However, no studies have been undertaken yet to assess why farmers conserve and maintain large agro-biodiversity, the extent of...

Sheep and goat production systems in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) operate under scarce natural resource constraints. A cross-sectional survey that covered 661 mixed farms, including major sheep and goat production, was conducted in the three regions of Abu Dhabi Emirate (Al-Ain, Western Region...

Hydrodistilled essential oils and dichloromethane (DCM) extracted volatiles were taken from cultivated specimens of <i>Prostanthera centralis</i>, endemic to central Australia.<i> </i>All volatiles were chemically characterised by Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GC-MS) with the use of authentic...

The effect of soil drought (10 days) on the growth of plants, the accumulation of water and leakage of electrolytes, gas exchange, the contents of chl <i>a</i> + <i>b</i> and carotenoids in leaves and photochemical activity of photosystem II was studied at the seedling stage by transient fluorescent analysis...

There has been an unprecedented demand for inexpensive plant-derived protein hydrolysates in recent years, owing to their potential nutritional applications. This review examines existing evidence regarding protein hydrolysates from agricultural crops such as wheat, soy, rapeseed, sunflower and...

Although science has helped us to identify and measure the threat of soil erosion to food production, we need to cast a wider net for effective solutions. Honest assessment suggests, in fact, that this kind of eco-agri-cultural issue exceeds the traditional boundaries of scientific interest. The...