Cover crops slow erosion, improve soil, smother weeds, enhance nutrient and moisture availability, help control many pests and bring a host of other benefits to your farm. At the same time, they can reduce costs, increase profits and even create new sources of income. You¿ll reap dividends on your cover crop investments for years, since their benefits accumulate over the long term. This book will help you find which ones are right for you. Captures farmer and other research results from the past ten years. The authors verified the info. from the 2nd ed., added new results and updated farmer profiles and research data, and added 2 chap. Includes maps and charts, detailed narratives about individual cover crop species, and chap. about aspects of cover cropping.
Degradation of soils continues at a pace that will eventually create a local, regional, or even global crisis when diminished soil resources collide with increasing climate variation. It's not too late to restore our soils to a more productive state by rediscovering the value of soil management, building on our well-established and ever-expanding scientific understanding of soils. Soil management concepts have been in place since the cultivation of crops, but we need to rediscover the principles that are linked together in effective soil management. This book is unique because of its treatment of soil management based on principles—the physical, chemical, and biological processes and how together they form the foundation for soil management processes that range from tillage to nutrient management. Whether new to soil science or needing a concise reference, readers will benefit from this book's ability to integrate the science of soils with management issues and long-term conservation efforts.
Nitrogen is an essential element for plant growth and development and a key agricultural input-but in excess it can lead to a host of problems for human and ecological health. Across the globe, distribution of fertilizer nitrogen is very uneven, with some areas subject to nitrogen pollution and others suffering from reduced soil fertility, diminished crop production, and other consequences of inadequate supply. Agriculture and the Nitrogen Cycle provides a global assessment of the role of nitrogen fertilizer in the nitrogen cycle. The focus of the book is regional, emphasizing the need to maintain food and fiber production while minimizing environmental impacts where fertilizer is abundant, and the need to enhance fertilizer utilization in systems where nitrogen is limited. The book is derived from a workshop held by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) in Kampala, Uganda, that brought together the world's leading scientists to examine and discuss the nitrogen cycle and related problems. It contains an overview chapter that summarizes the group's findings, four chapters on cross-cutting issues, and thirteen background chapters. The book offers a unique synthesis and provides an up-to-date, broad perspective on the issues of nitrogen fertilizer in food production and the interaction of nitrogen and the environment.
This book provides a review of precision agriculture technology development, followed by a presentation of the state-of-the-art and future requirements of precision agriculture technology. It presents different styles of precision agriculture technologies suitable for large scale mechanized farming; highly automated community-based mechanized production; and fully mechanized farming practices commonly seen in emerging economic regions. The book emphasizes the introduction of core technical features of sensing, data processing and interpretation technologies, crop modeling and production control theory, intelligent machinery and field robots for precision agriculture production.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) has revolutionized the measurement of position, velocity, and time. It has rapidly evolved into a worldwide utility with more than a billion receiver sets currently in use that provide enormous benefits to humanity: improved safety of life, increased productivity, and wide-spread convenience. Global Navigation Satellite Systems summarizes the joint workshop on Global Navigation Satellite Systems held jointly by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering on May 24-25, 2011 at Hongqiao Guest Hotel in Shanghai, China. "We have one world, and only one set of global resources. It is important to work together on satellite navigation. Competing and cooperation is like Yin and Yang. They need to be balanced," stated Dr. Charles M. Vest, President of the National Academy of Engineering, in the workshop's opening remarks. Global Navigation Satellite Systems covers the objectives of the workshop, which explore issues of enhanced interoperability and interchangeability for all civil users aimed to consider collaborative efforts for countering the global threat of inadvertent or illegal interference to GNSS signals, promotes new applications for GNSS, emphasizing productivity, safety, and environmental protection. The workshop featured presentations chosen based on the following criteria: they must have relevant engineering/technical content or usefulness; be of mutual interest; offer the opportunity for enhancing GNSS availability, accuracy, integrity, and/or continuity; and offer the possibility of recommendations for further actions and discussions. Global Navigation Satellite Systems is an essential report for engineers, workshop attendees, policy makers, educators, and relevant government agencies.
