What is crop variation?
Crop diversity is the variance in genetic and phenotypic characteristics of plants used in agriculture. Over the past 50 years, there has been a major decline in two components of crop diversity; genetic diversity within each crop and the number of species commonly grown.
What are the factors that affect field crop production?
The four most important factors that influence crop yield are soil fertility, availability of water, climate, and diseases or pests.
What is spatial variability in precision agriculture?
Spatial variability in crop production occurs as a result of spatial and temporal variations in soil structure and fertility; soil physical, chemical and hydraulic properties; irrigation applications; pests and diseases; and plant genetics.
What are the different field crops?
Also attacked are field crops such as alfalfa, clover, soybean, sugarbeet, sunflower and tobacco, as well as woody plants such as apple, cherry, hickory, maple, oak, redbud, rose, and walnut.
What is the importance of having variation in a certain crop?
Genetic diversity is needed to safeguard potentially vital traits that could be used to combat an unexpected future pest or adapt to the needs of the world’s food supply. Plant breeders utilize genetic diversity to create improved crop varieties with traits such as yield, pest resistance and environment stress.
What is the importance of crop diversity?
Crop diversity is fundamental to agricultural growth. Crop diversity enables farmers and plant breeders to develop higher yielding, more productive varieties that have the improved quality characteristics required by farmers and desired by consumers.
How can crop production be increased?
Crop genetic improvement, by GM or conventional approaches, is only one of many methods that can be used to improve crop performance. Others involve improvements in farm practices, irrigation, drainage, and herbicide, pesticide and fertiliser use.
What are the different abiotic factors affecting crop production?
Abiotic factors like humidity, temperature, moisture, wind, rain, flood and many more destroy the crop raise. Abiotic factors like hot, cold, drought, salinity, etc. affect crop production.
What is the importance of variability to agriculture?
Variability is key The benefits of using precision agriculture technology come from being able to manage crops in a way that precisely matches the needs of a specific area. Precision agriculture technology can be used to vary applications of fertilizer, herbicide, or manure, as well as to adjust seeding rate.
What is temporal variability in agriculture?
seasonal temporal variability is the change in weed infestation patterns between growing seasons. (Zhang et al., 2002). The spatial and temporal yield variability within the whole field can be controlled by dividing the. field into homogenous management zones.
What are the 3 categories of field crop production?
This distinction is unique to the USDA: specialty crops are defined as fruits, nuts, and vegetables (including floriculture and nursery plants), while field crops are everything else (grains, dry legumes, oilseeds, fiber crops, and hay).