Agriculture

England is as old as Methuselah. Historians can tell better. Nevertheless, agricultural historians can bear me witness that English agriculture has come of age. Under conventional conditions a generation is equivalent to one century. Therefore, eight generations require eight centuries. The question is what has made an island country conspicuous in the agricultural map of the world. Let us take a look .

Lack of appropriate technology, difficulty of measuring bed load and unclear boundary between bed load and suspended load induce experts to determine a part of suspended load as bed load. This ratio in many rivers with different conditions has the same coefficient and sometimes in a river, different experts estimate various ratios. In this study, two reach of Taleghan and Jajroud rivers was selected to determine the ratio, while stream flow was simulated by HEC-RAS software in both reaches. Bed load was calculated by Meyer-Peter-Muller, Casey, Schoklitch and Van Rijn equations, and Einstein, Chang-Simons-Richardsin, Begnold and Toffalati equations were used to estimate suspended load. After validation of equations, results showed that in both rivers, Schoklitch equation provides the best estimation for bed load. For suspended load, the Einstein and the Bagnold equations provided the best estimation for Jajroud and Taleghan rivers, respectively. R and Re tests and selecting of best equations for estimation of bed and suspended loads showed that bed load to suspended load ratio was about 3.76 and 0.14 in Jajroud and Taleghan rivers, respectively.

Greenhouse farming in Kenya is becoming a lucrative investment as well as a means of improving food production in marginal environments. The Greenhouse is intended to regulate external conditions including soil moisture content suitable to different types of crops. Many farmers use timers to control irrigation, but timers do not account to day to day changes in plant use. The aim of this study was to analyze the challenges faced in regulation of soil moisture content in greenhouses; The study was guided by Mamdani Fuzzy Logic Theory that uses Nested “IF THEN RULES”. Preliminary data was collected through Observation and Interview schedules. The population of the study comprises five greenhouse farmers and four field officers. Experimental Research Methodology was applied. The study found out that most small scale farmers had a lot of difficulties in determining and controlling soil moisture content. Apart from having a person on site at the right time to control the turning on and off of the water taps, they also mention the following as being the prevalent challenges: Lack of appropriate equipment to measure, monitor and regulate the soil moisture content, inability to determine the correct or the optimum moisture level for a particular crop, inability to determine water holding capacity of a specific type of soil in the greenhouse for a particular crop, inability to measure the nutrient concentration at a given soil moisture content and its uptake by the crop, Source of power to the Greenhouse and Lack of enough funds to buy the equipment.

The national water policy of India is not concomitant with its land use pattern. The countries constituting the SAARC recognise trade and economic relationships among the member countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Srilanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives but does not attempt at a comprehensive land and water resources policy for the region. But the rivers flowing in the SAARC region are not confined to national boundaries. In a similar manner no such policy exists among the member states of India. Population growth, unchecked urban migration against limited land and water resources has led to piecemeal and short term approaches to management rather than attempting at holistic global solutions in land and water sharing among the member states of India. For instance in Tamilnadu, water starved state, sharing of waters from the 45 rivers from neighbouring Kerala state has not been successful so far. With the result these rivers originating in Kerala flow waste to Arabian sea. One of the major drawbacks occurring in these exercises is the Tamilnadu has so far been concerned at its own interest in procuring water from Kerala rather than attempting to point out the benefits accruing to kerala which has no space to store the water. Research done in this regard reveal that benefits accruing to Kerala state are substantial in comparison with Tamilnadu.

The objective of this study was to determine the internal and external quality characteristics of quail eggs and the effect of egg weight and body size on these traits. For this investigation, one hundred thirty-two eggs were obtained from 120 Japanese quails grown on a deep litter system. Egg Weight (EW), Egg Length (EL), Egg Width (EWT), Yolk Height (YH), Yolk Diameter (YD), Albumen Length (AL), Albumen Height (AH), Yolk Weight (YW), Shell Weight (SW), Shell Thickness (ST), and Albumen Diameter (AD) were all measured, and Egg Surface Area (ESA), Unit Surface Shell Weight (USW), Egg Index (EI), Shell Ratio (SR). According to the findings, age significantly affected egg weight, body weight, yolk diameter, shell weight, egg surface area, and unit surface shell weight (P<0.05). However, all other parameters were not affected by age (P>0.05). Furthermore, increasing egg weight had a negative effect on egg shape index and egg yolk ratio. Most of the internal egg quality traits studied were negatively affected by increasing the eggshell ratio.

The term “producer” rather than “farmer” because it covers all aspects of agricultural production, including livestock and fisheries, and the processing of agricultural products on-farm or in the rural areas (such as the women’s cottage industries). The producer organizations (POs) considered are formal rural organizations whose members organized themselves with the objective of improving farm income through improved production, marketing, and local processing activities. POs deal with: policies on issues such as pricing and export and import of agricultural products; improvement of agricultural production practices; access to inputs and services, including agricultural credit; marketing of agricultural production; and local processing of agricultural production and its marketing. Collectivization of producers, especially small and marginal farmers, into producer organizations has emerged as one of the most effective pathways to address the many challenges of agriculture but most importantly, improved access to investments, technology and inputs and markets. Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture, Govt. of India has identified farmer producer organization registered under the special provisions of the Companies Act, 1956 as the most appropriate institutional form around which to mobilize farmers and build their capacity to collectively leverage their production and marketing strength. It has been argued that rural producer organizations (RPOs) are an effective tool for solving problems in rural areas and promoting agricultural development. The empirical evidence of the effectiveness of POs on serving their members is scarce at best.

The pollinating of oil palm is cross pollination. The important insect that play an important role is Elaeidobius kamerunicus (EK). The superior DP hybrid with high sex ratio in young plants resulted in a lack of pollen.The Hatch and Carry technique is used to increase EK populations. This research aimed to determine the effectiveness of EK with Hatch and Carry technique on the fruit set level. The EK population increased the fruit set from 69% to 80%; Hatch and Carry techniques are effective on plantations dominated with young plant, and this technique can increase productivity by 5 - 16%

In this study, various Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) were developed to determine the economics indices for seed and grain corn production in Ardabil province, Iran. For this purpose, the data was collected by a face-to-face interview method from 144 corn farms during 2011 and analyzed. The results indicated that total energy input for seed and grain corn productions was about 45162.77 and 35198.11, respectively. The developed ANN was a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with six neurons in the input layer (human labor, machinery, diesel fuel, chemical fertilizer, chemicals, seed), one, two and three hidden layer(s) of various numbers of neurons and four neuron (BCR, P, TR, NR) in the output layer. The results of ANNs analyze showed that the best MLP network models for predicting economic indices in seed and grain corn production had (6-6-10-4) and (6-4-8-4) topologies, respectively. For these topologies, MSE, MAE and R2 calculated. The ANN approach appears to be a suitable method for modeling output energy, fuel consumption, CO2 emission, yield, and energy consumption.

Drip irrigation systems have a preference in selecting a suitable irrigation method in arid and semi-arid regions because of its high potential in uniform applying water in through a field. A proper management of drip irrigation system is, to some extent, dependent upon accurate understanding of wetting patterns distributions in soil under different combinations of soil type and emitter discharge rate. Using statistical distribution to estimate wetting front pattern in drip irrigation systems can improve their performance in different conditions. In this paper, the wetting area and water distribution on light, medium and heavy texture homogeneous soils in subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) and surface irrigation (DI) were evaluated. Experimental tests were carried out in a plexiglass lysimeter container with transparent walls. Emitters were buried at 15, 30 and 45 cm depths and discharge rates of 2.4, 4 and 6 L/h were applied. In this research, data of water front was divided into tree hourly periodic lengths of 2, 4 and 6. Then, with analysis of data in time series according to HYFA software output and goodness fit of Relative Residual Square Mean, suitable frequency distribution function for different conditions was evaluated. Based on relative frequency, the best fitted distribution for DI and SDI was found to be Normal and Pearson type III distribution (Moment method) and Normal distribution (maximum likelihood method).

Studies on orange production in Mazandaran province are necessary due to its potential for production and large cultivation area. In this study energy input-output, economic analysis and econometric modeling of energy input for orange production in Sari region of Iran were carried out. From a total of 86 farmers considered for the analysis, the total input and output energy were 54.2 and 59.2 GJ ha-1, respectively. Diesel fuel, fertilizer and water had the highest energy values per hectare, respectively. Results showed that the overall energy ratio (Energy use efficiency) was calculated as 1.09. The relationships between various energy sources and yield were found using Cobb-Douglas production function. Econometric models showed that among all energy sources chemical fertilizer, farmyard manure and water for irrigation had the most significant impact on orange yield. Additionally, economic analysis was carried out with results showing that the bene?t to cost ratio and net return for orange production were 10.6 and 16420.4 $ h-1, respectively.