Agriculture and Environmental Science Research

Flooding is the number one natural disaster in the United States. While levees can help reduce the risk of flooding, it is important to remember that they do not completely eliminate the risk. Chapter One discusses their downsides, as well as why the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) require periodic levee inspections and evaluations. Chapter Two focuses on the Mississippi River levee system, which is one of the largest levee systems in the world, in order to better understand the levee-delta interaction and its impact on the loss of vast expanses of coastal land on deltas around the globe.

Recent progressions in mechanized farming technology have radically transformed the current agricultural industry to fulfill the rising and incessantly changing needs of consumers around the globe. To ensure the sufficient supply and production of quality crop plants, agriculture robots have appeared as a potential solution. Apart from robotic harvesting mechanisms, agricultural robots have enhanced the efficiency of planting, slicing, food preservation, and resource tracking. These robotic developments have proven beneficial for determining farmworker labor scarcities and growing crop yields. Both of these benefits are critical to ensure sustainable food production for consumers around the globe. This book provides a comprehensive review of key advances in the use of robots in agriculture. Although automation and robotics are making rapid inroads into different areas of agricultural farming, there is a great demand for improvement of existing robotic technology and the development of novel techniques. Eight chapters of this book summarise advances in guidance and location systems, machine vision, GPS technologies, actuation, navigation, control technologies, and communication. This book encompasses all of the fundamental aspects of automation and robotic technology used in agriculture. Therefore, this book can be considered as reference material for readers from diverse backgrounds including forestry, agriculture, robotics, and automobiles industry.

Across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, urban farmers and gardeners are reclaiming cultural traditions linked to food, farming, and health; challenging systemic racism and injustice in the food system; demanding greater community control of resources in marginalized neighborhoods; and moving towards their visions of more equitable urban futures. As part of this urgent work, urban farmers and gardeners encounter and reckon with both the cultural meanings and material legacies of the past. Drawing on their narratives, Back to the Roots demonstrates that urban agriculture is a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing inequalities that shape both the materiality of cities and the bodies of their inhabitants.  

Our current food system has decimated rural communities and confined the choices of urban consumers. Even while America continues to ramp up farm production to astounding levels, net farm income is now lower than at the onset of the Great Depression, and one out of every eight Americans faces hunger. But a healthier and more equitable food system is possible. In Building Community Food Webs, Ken Meter shows how grassroots food and farming leaders across the U.S. are tackling these challenges by constructing civic networks. Overturning extractive economic structures, these inspired leaders are engaging low-income residents, farmers, and local organizations in their quest to build stronger communities. Community food webs strive to build health, wealth, capacity, and connection. Their essential element is building greater respect and mutual trust, so community members can more effectively empower themselves and address local challenges. Farmers and researchers may convene to improve farming practices collaboratively. Health clinics help clients grow food for themselves and attain better health. Food banks engage their customers to challenge the root causes of poverty. Municipalities invest large sums to protect farmland from development. Developers forge links among local businesses to strengthen economic trade. Leaders in communities marginalized by our current food system are charting a new path forward. Building Community Food Webs captures the essence of these efforts, underway in diverse places including Montana, Hawai'i, Vermont, Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, and Minnesota. Addressing challenges as well as opportunities, Meter offers pragmatic insights for community food leaders and other grassroots activists alike.

The aim of this book is to represent a new way of thinking about sustainable production of specialty/functional foods using specialized culture techniques and demand oriented distribution. Interesting research on controlled environment agriculture from around the world are brought together in this book to produce a valuable resource for teachers, researchers, commercial growers and advanced students of plant biological science.

Although organic farming and agroecology are normally not associated with the use of new technologies, it's rapid growth, new technologies are being adopted to mitigate environmental impacts of intensive production implemented with external material and energy inputs. GPS, satellite images, GIS, drones, help conventional farming in precision supply of water, pesticides, fertilizers. Prescription maps define the right place and moment for interventions of machinery fleets. Yield goal remains the key objective, integrating a more efficient use or resources toward an economic-environmental sustainability. Technological smart farming allows extractive agriculture entering the sustainability era. Societies that practice agroecology through the development of human-environmental co-evolutionary systems represent a solid model of sustainability. These systems are characterized by high-quality agroecosystems and landscapes, social inclusion, and viable economies. This book explores the challenges posed by the new geographic information technologies in agroecology and organic farming. It discusses the differences among technology-laden conventional farming systems and the role of technologies in strengthening the potential of agroecology. The first part reviews the new tools offered by geographic information technologies to farmers and people. The second part provides case studies of most promising application of technologies in organic farming and agroecology: the diffusion of hyperspectral imagery, the role of positioning systems, the integration of drones with satellite imagery. The third part of the book, explores the role of agroecology using a multiscale approach from the farm to the landscape level. This section explores the potential of Geodesign in promoting alliances between farmers and people, and strengthening food networks, whether through proximity urban farming or asserting land rights in remote areas in the spirit of agroecological transition. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.

The knowledge of plant responses to various abiotic stresses is crucial to understand their underlying mechanisms as well as the methods to develop new varieties of crops, which are better suited to the environment they are grown in. Environmental Stress Physiology of Plants and Crop Productivity provides readers a timely update on the knowledge about plant responses to a variety of stresses such as salinity, temperature, drought, oxidative stress and mineral deficiencies. Chapters focus on biochemical mechanisms identified in plants crucial to adapting to specific abiotic stressors along with the methods of improving plant tolerance. The book also sheds light on plant secondary metabolites such as phenylpropanoids and plant growth regulators in ameliorating the stressful conditions in plants. Additional chapters present an overview of applications of genomics, proteomics and metabolomics (including CRISPR/CAS techniques) to develop abiotic stress tolerant crops. The editors have also provided detailed references for extended reading to support the information in the book. Environmental Stress Physiology of Plants and Crop Productivity is an informative reference for scholars and researchers working in the field of botany, agriculture, crop science and physiology, soil science, and environmental sciences.

This publication looks into sustainable options for producing fruit and vegetables, from both farm-level and policy perspectives, covering genetic resources, seed systems, water, soil, pest control, and reduction of food loss and waste. It considers how to integrate small-scale farmers into socially inclusive value chains, including innovative post-harvest handling services and market linkages.

The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) is the primary statistical data collection agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). NASS conducts hundreds of surveys each year and prepares reports covering virtually every aspect of U.S. agriculture. Among the small-area estimates produced by NASS are county-level estimates for crops (planted acres, harvested acres, production, and yield by commodity) and for cash rental rates for irrigated cropland, nonirrigated cropland, and permanent pastureland. Key users of these county-level estimates include USDA (TM)s Farm Services Agency (FSA) and Risk Management Agency (RMA), which use the estimates as part of their processes for distributing farm subsidies and providing farm insurance, respectively.

Winner, American Sociological Association Section on Environment and Technology Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award. Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment sheds light on the structural causes of these and other social and environmental crises, highlighting in particular the key role that elite-controlled organizations, institutions, and networks play in creating these crises.

Climatic variations often tend to have adverse effect on the yield and production of crops. Efforts have, therefore, been on for harnessing this natural resource through artificial means for increasing crop productivity. One such technology is protected cultivation. This technique is well adopted in Europe and USA and now China and Japan are leading in controlled sphere production of horticultural crops. In India, the technology is making breakthrough in Karnataka and Maharashtra in protected cultivation of pepper, tomato, cucumber, muskmelon, baby corn etc. Precision farming is defined as the cultivation by adopting technologies which give maximum precision in production of a superior crop with a desired yield levels and quality at competitive production. These include use of genetically modified crop varieties, micropropagation, integrated nutrient, water and pest managements, protected cultivation, organic farming, hi-tech horticulture, and post harvest technology. Post-harvest sector needs lot of precision. Peels, rags, etc. go waste. Many times, peels being rich in polyphenols, colouring pigment, nutrients etc are richer in antioxidant than what we actually eat. Here, we need precision. Precision in management, precision in product diversification, precision in value addition are much sought after aspect.

This book is about the invisible or subtle nature of food and farming, and also about the nature of existence. Everything that we know (and do not know) about the physical world has a subtle counterpart which has been scarcely considered in modernist farming practice and research. If you think this book isn't for you, if it appears more important to attend to the pressing physical challenges the world is facing before having the luxury of turning to such subtleties, then think again. For it could be precisely this worldview - the one prioritises the physical-material dimension of reality - that helped get us into this situation in the first place. Perhaps we need a different worldview to get us out? This book makes a foundational contribution to the discipline of Subtle Agroecologies, a nexus of indigenous epistemologies, multidisciplinary advances in wave-based and ethereal studies, and the science of sustainable agriculture. Not a farming system in itself, Subtle Agroecologies superimposes a non-material dimension upon existing, materially-based agroecological farming systems. Bringing together 43 authors from 12 countries and five continents, from the natural and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities, this multi-contributed book introduces the discipline, explaining its relevance and potential contribution to the field of Agroecology. Research into Subtle Agroecologies may be described as the systematic study of the nature of the invisible world as it relates to the practice of agriculture, and to do this through adapting and innovating with research methods, in particular with those of a more embodied nature, with the overall purpose of bringing and maintaining balance and harmony. Such research is an open-minded inquiry, its grounding being the lived experiences of humans working on, and with, the land over several thousand years to the present. By reclaiming and reinterpreting the perennial relationship between humans and nature, the implications would revolutionise agriculture, heralding a new wave of more sustainable farming techniques, changing our whole relationship with nature to one of real collaboration rather than control, and ultimately transforming ourselves.

Industrial agriculture is responsible for widespread environmental degradation and undermines the pursuit of human well-being. With a projected global population of 10 billion by 2050, it is urgent for humanity to achieve a more sustainable approach to farming and food systems.This concise text offers an overview of the key issues in sustainable food production for all readers interested in the ecology and environmental impacts of agriculture. It details the ecological foundations of farming and food systems, showing how knowledge from the natural and social sciences can be used to create sustainable alternatives to the industrial production methods used today. Beginning with a discussion of the role of agriculture in human development, the primer examines how twentieth-century farming methods are environmentally and socially unsustainable, contributing to global change and perpetuating inequalities. The authors explain the principles of environmental sustainability and explore how these principles can be put into practice in agrifood systems. They emphasize the importance of human well-being and insist on the centrality of social and environmental equity and justice.Sustainable Food Production is a compelling guide to how we can improve our ability to feed each other today and preserve the ability of our planet to do so tomorrow. Appropriate for a range of courses in the natural and social sciences, it provides a comprehensive yet accessible framework for achieving agricultural sustainability in the Anthropocene.

This book explains how True Cost Accounting is an effective tool we can use to address the pervasive imbalance in our food system. Calls are coming from all quarters that the food system is broken and needs a radical transformation. A system that feeds many yet continues to create both extreme hunger and diet-related diseases, and one which has significant environmental impacts, is not serving the world adequately. This volume argues that True Cost Accounting in our food system can create a framework for a systemic shift. What sounds on the surface like a practice relegated to accountants is ultimately a call for a new lens on the valuation of food and a new relationship with the food we eat, starting with the reform of a system out of balance. From the true cost of corn, rice and water, to incentives for soil health, the chapters economically compare conventional and regenerative, more equitable farming practices in and food system structures, including taking an unflinching look at the true cost of cheap labour. Overall, this volume points towards the potential for our food system to be more human-centred than profit-centred and one that has a more respectful relationship to the planet. It sets forth a path forward based on True Cost Accounting for food. This path seeks to fix our current food metrics, in policy and in practice, by applying a holistic lens that evaluates the actual costs and benefits of different food systems, and the impacts and dependencies between natural systems, human systems, agriculture and food systems. This volume is essential reading for professionals and policymakers involved in developing and reforming the food system, as well as students and scholars working on food policy, food systems and sustainability.

Vegetables are important constituents of our healthy diet and provide more profits to the growers. Crop improvement is the most satisfying method of increasing the productivity of any crop. Production and consumption of vegetables has expanded greatly. Improved varieties have had a main role in the increase in yield and quality of vegetable crops. The diversity of vegetable crops is appalling and greatly contributed to increased production and consumption of vegetables world over. For improvement of crops information on origin, distribution and evolution of crop and its related species is very essential. Information on genetics and genetic resources is prerequisite to choose the appropriate breedinng strategies to fulfill the objectives. Objectives of breeding vary with region and also purpose for which the product is used i.e., for fresh market, for processing or dual purpose and how the crop is grown i.e., under protection, open field cultivation or kitchen garden etc. Depending on the objectives and genetic resources, breeding methods or procedures can be adopted and it will results in useful varieties or hybrids. Information on breeding of vegetables crops is covered in very abridged form. More number of crops covered in this book by appending and updating information on genetics, genetic resources, breeding methods/procedures and varieties developed in each of the 26 vegetable crops wherever information is available. Origin and evolution, genetic resources, genetics of fruits, breeding methods and varieties/hybrids developed is the sequence followed in presenting the and varieties/hybrids developed is the sequence followed in presenting the information on each of the crops.