Crops

This paper evaluates the determinants of decision making in relation to the production of four crops (banana, cassava, potato and sweet potato). Understanding the division of labour and decision-making in crop management may lead to designing better interventions targeted at improving efficiency in smallholder agriculture. A household quantitative survey with heads of households involving 261 women and 144 men in Burundi and 184 women and 222 men in Rwanda was conducted in 2014. Most of the decisions and labour provision during production of both cash crops (potato and banana) and food crops (sweet potato and cassava) were done jointly by men and women in male-headed households. Higher values for ‘credit access’, ‘land size’ and ‘farming as the main occupation of the household head’ increased the frequency of joint decision-making in male-headed households. A decline in the amount of farm income reduced the participation of men as decision makers....

Incorporation into wider social and economic systems has brought a variety of changes to the hunting-gathering lifestyle of the Batak of the Philippines. Compared to 100 years ago, Batak hunting-gathering camps today are more limited in duration and smaller in size, hunting-gathering itself is more seasonal in importance, and there are significant differences in technology, resource utilization, the organization of

Fly ash (FA), the notorious waste product of coal based thermal power plants, known for its ill effects on agricultural land, may now come as an aid for the farming community. Because of its great availability and low cost, further possibility of its usage should be investigated. Fly ash from both coal and lignite- acts as a good carrier for bio pesticides. It is used as a conditioner to arrest soil erosion, and to induce plant resistance against diseases. However, several studies proposed that FA can be used to improve physical, chemical and biological properties of the degraded soils and is a source of easily available and cheaper micro, macro-nutrients for crops. Thus use of fly-ash is an effective way of utilization of problematic fly-ash waste in a useful manner. In this study, the review covers the sources, merits and applications of fly ash and fly ash based biopesticides and fertilizers in agriculture. This study also discusses the case studies and scientific reports about t...

A spatial decision support system (SDSS) based on multi-criteria and multi-objective decision analysis is applied in a case study in Ethiopia to reduce soil erosion on the basis of reallocation of crops according to their capacity to protect the soil. The case study is carried out in the Adwa district. The SDSS has been implemented using the widespread GIS software IDRISI 32 (release 2) and with the direct involvement of local stakeholders in defining factors and constraints. These are based on land cover-land use, altitude, potential erosion, proximity to roads, water and the relative soil protective capacity of each crop species. A reduction of soil loss from an average of 4.5 t ha−1 yr−1 to values below the risk threshold of soil degradation (1 t ha−1 yr−1) would be achieved through the application of the SDSS results. The biggest impediment to the reallocation exercise, however, is the shortage of cultivable land suitable for cultivation.

Today, half of the Netherlands is situated below sea level. Because of this, water-management is of key importance when it comes to maintaining present-day habitation of the Dutch low-lands. In prehistory, however, large parts of the Dutch landscape were highly dynamic due to ongoing fluvial sedimentation. Vast deltaic areas with ceaseless river activity formed the backdrop against which prehistoric occupation took place. Although such landscapes may seem inhospitable, the often excellently preserved archaeological evidence indicates that people lived in these lowlands throughout prehistory.

This book describes why Bronze Age farmers were keen to settle here and how these prehistoric communities structured the landscape around their house-sites at various scales. Using a vast body of evidence from several large-scale excavations in the Dutch river area, the author, reconstructs the changes in the cultural landscape over time. Starting from the Middle Neolithic, changing preferences for settlement site locations and changes in domestic architecture are traced in detail to the Iron Age. However, for proper understanding of the cultural landscape, not only settlements but also graves and patterns of object deposition – and their landscape characteristics – are discussed.

By using evidence of over 50 major excavations, yielding over 300 house plans, this book contains by far the richest data-set on Dutch Bronze Age settlements. Most of these results were not before published in English, making this book of over 500 pages a true academic treasure for an international audience.

The in-depth presentation of Bronze Age settlement sites, as well as the critical discussion of models and premises current in later prehistoric settlement archaeology, have an important relevance stretching beyond the Dutch lowland areas on which it is based. The wealth of high-quality Dutch data is presented as a synthesized (yet well-annotated) narrative, that rises above mere site interpretation, even more so due to its landscape-scale focus. Therefore this book is a must-have for those interested in later prehistoric cultural landscapes and settlement archaeology.

This Project aims to realize an Environmental and Social Development Plan through an Environmental Assessment Study. This study is for the building of a Biosafety Lab in Kamboinse. Throughout the implementation of the project, there will be both positive and negative impacts on the different components of the environment. Large quantities of dust, smoke and exhaust gases, and other suspended solids that may exceed the discharge standards will be observed. The soil will undergo degradation through its upper layer, and this could increase water and wind erosion of soils. The negative impacts will be felt on the quality of surface water which will experience a certain turbidity due to the deposition of suspended solids. The project site has low vegetation cover, however, excavation and land clearing will cause the destruction of the scarce tree individuals, shrubs and grass cover. For terrestrial wildlife, the work will have no significant impact, it should be noted, however, the destr...

A brief review of our signal and image processing application in precision agriculture is presented. A method for determining sampling frequency for agriculture data is proposed, and some initial results based on data simulation and image processing are reported