Top Research Papers on Agriculture

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) is seeking to overcome the food security problem and develop rural livelihoods while minimizing negative impacts on the environment. However, when such synergies exist, the situation of small-scale farmers is often overlooked, and they are unable to implement new practices and technologies. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to improve CSA by adding the neglected but very important element “small-scale farmer”, and introduce Vulnerable-Smart Agriculture (VSA) as a complete version of CSA. VSA indicates, based on the results of this study, that none of the ...

Digital agriculture — digital and geospatial technologies to monitor, assess and manage soil, climatic and genetic resources — illustrates how to meet the challenge of sustainable food production.

1. Early Agriculture: Recent Conceptual and Methodological Developments 2. An Evolutionary Continuum of Plant-People Interaction (1989) 3. Darwinism and its Role in the Explanation of Domestication (1989) 4. Non-Affluent Foragers: Resource Availability, Seasonal Shortages, and the Emergence of Agriculture in Panamanian Tropical Forests (1989) 5. The Impact of Maize on Subsistence Systems in South America: An Example from the Jama River Valley, Coastal Ecuador (1999) 6. Cultural Implications of Crop Introductions in Andean Prehistory (1999) 7. Early Plant Cultivation in the Eastern Woodlands of...

This text covers the latest research in agricultural contaminants, details heavy metal impact on plants and crops, and includes effective management techniques for agricultural contaminants along with environmental impact and methods to control results.

In recent decades, the Chinese government launched a socialized agricultural service system to help smallholders quickly modernize. This system helps farmers adopt modern-day farming operations to meet ever-increasing food and fiber requirements. The present study was conducted to analyze the impacts of this system on agricultural production efficiency. To this end, the Hubei province of China was selected, and the required data were retrieved from the Hubei Statistical Yearbook and Rural Statistical Yearbook for the years 2008 to 2019. The entropy method was applied to measure the extent of t...

China's agricultural sector is dominated by smallholder farms, which mostly exhibit relatively low nutrient use efficiency, low agricultural income and substantial non-point-source pollution. Here we assess the spatial feasibility and cost-effectiveness of agricultural land consolidation in China by integrating data from over 40,000 rural surveys, ecological modelling and geostatistical analysis. We found that 86% of Chinese croplands could be consolidated to establish a large-scale farming regime with an average field size greater than 16 ha. This would result in a 59% and 91% increase in kno...

A systematic literature review of the scientific literature related to crop farming published in the last decade is conducted to analyse the emerging trends of digital technologies in the agricultural industry, showing that digital technologies such as autonomous robotic systems, internet of things, and machine learning are significantly explored.

Sustained interest by the business community in commercial agriculture in the global South has been welcomed for its potential to bring capital into long neglected rural areas, but has also raised concerns over implications for customary land rights and the terms of integration of local land and labor into global supply chains. In global development policy and discourse, the concept of "inclusive business" has become central in efforts to resolve these tensions, with the idea that integrating smallholders and other disadvantaged actors into partnerships with agribusiness firms can generate ben...

This comprehensive review article enlightens the potential of the IoT in the advancement of agriculture and the challenges faced when combining these advanced technologies with conventional agricultural systems and identified advanced prospects regarding the IoT, which are essential tools for sustainable agriculture.

This work presents Agriculture-Vision: a large-scale aerial farmland image dataset for semantic segmentation of agricultural patterns, and proposes an effective model designed for aerial agricultural pattern recognition.

This paper takes the Beijing Liuminying Ecological Farm as a case study and proposed a “blockchain-based electronic agriculture” framework for its development and challenges, and proves that democratization and blockchain are general-purpose technologies which have “pervasiveness”.

We discuss recent trends in agricultural productivity in Africa and highlight how technological progress in agriculture has stagnated on the continent. We briefly review the literature that tries to explain this stagnation through the lens of particular constraints to technology adoption. Ultimately, none of these constraints alone can explain these trends. New research highlights pervasive heterogeneity in the gross and net returns to agricultural technologies across Africa. We argue that this heterogeneity makes the adoption process more challenging, limits the scope of many innovations, and...

Agriculture faces many challenges. In both public discourse and the scientific literature debates about the future are increasing framed in terms of ‘alternative’ versus ‘conventional’ agriculture. In this paper we critically examine this framing, and seek to understand how the term conventional has been and is being used. We argue that the category conventional agriculture has little analytical purchase, and that its use is part of a strategy of homogenising, normalising and othering. In effect, the term conventional agriculture has been weaponised. This helps explain the sterile and unproduc...

Nickle (Beltsille Agricultural Research Center of the USDA) has engaged 29 internationally known experts to replace the classic work of I.N. Filipjev (1934) with a modern work taking note of 188 additional genera, and 4,650 more species.

A catheter introducer adapted to facilitate insertion of a catheter into a patient without requiring a large aperture be made in the patient wherethrough a separate catheter may be inserted includes an elongate narrow wire adapted to pass through the catheter and be sufficiently long so as to protrude from an open distal end of theCatheter.

Originally published in 1985, this book argues forcefully and practically for new relationship between science and the small farmer. It advocates scientific research seeking out changes which are already taking place within the smallholder farming sector and building on local initiatives. Drawing on his experience of West Africa, the author demonstrates that many of the most successful innovations in food-crop production during the 20th century have indigenous roots and that there should therefore be less emphasis on 'teaching' farmers how to farm and more emphasis on how to foster and support...

Abstract The anthropogenic impacts of development and frequent droughts have limited Iran's water availability. This has major implications for Iran's agricultural sector which is responsible for about 90% of water consumption at the national scale. This study investigates if declining water availability impacted agriculture in Iran. Using the Mann‐Kendall and Sen's slope estimator methods, we explored the changes in Iran's agricultural production and area during the 1981–2013 period. Despite decreasing water availability during this period, irrigated agricultural production and area continuou...

Current conventional agriculture is considered unsustainable and inadequate to address great societal challenges such as climate change, environmental pollution, food security, dependence on fossil energy as well as the decline of natural resources and biodiversity. Many of these problems are related to agricultural specialization (i.e. monoculture) and the consequent simplification of the agroecosystem. In this respect, efforts aimed at improving individual agronomic techniques and at increasing the use-efficiency of external inputs (e.g. synthetic inputs, fossil fuels), without modifying the...

Abstract This paper will examine the social and ethical impacts of using artificial intelligence (AI) in the agricultural sector. It will identify what are some of the most prevalent challenges and impacts identified in the literature, how this correlates with those discussed in the domain of AI ethics, and are being implemented into AI ethics guidelines. This will be achieved by examining published articles and conference proceedings that focus on societal or ethical impacts of AI in the agri-food sector, through a thematic analysis of the literature. The thematic analysis will be divided bas...

The impact of COVID-19 on the agro-food system and its economy stressing critical factors like food production, demand, price hikes, security, and supply chain resilience is reviewed.