Legume Farming Articles
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Could traditional plants hold the secret to saving crops from pests?
Researchers build on age-old practices to reduce food loss in Africa Without any effort at all, Hawa Saidi Ibura crushes dried beans, one at a time, between her fingers outside her home in Endagaw, a village in northern Tanzania. She’s holding a basket of a type of red bean eaten all over East Africa, but these beans are skeletons of what they once were. She harvested them from her farm ...
By Ensia
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Evaluation of indigenous Omani legumes for their nutritional quality, phytochemical composition and antioxidant properties
Four indigenous Omani legumes (faba bean, cowpeas, chickpeas and lentils), collected from three different regions of Oman, were evaluated for their proximate composition, phytochemical contents and antioxidant properties. The proximate composition varied significantly. Regional variability however, did not affect the proximate composition, except crude protein content of cowpea and chickpea. The ...
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Rake In Greater Capacity And Higher Hay Quality
It’s been said that the steel-toothed dump rake was first introduced in the 1860s. Of course, the process back then was to rake hay into piles, which were then pitched onto a wagon for transport to a haystack or the barn loft. To make windrows for the balers that came later, the operator simply spaced the “dumps” equally so they lined up in the field. The irony is that until ...
By Vermeer
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Many Countries Reaching Diminishing Returns in Fertilizer Use
When German chemist Justus von Liebig demonstrated in 1847 that the major nutrients that plants removed from the soil could be applied in mineral form, he set the stage for the development of the fertilizer industry and a huge jump in world food production a century later. Growth in food production during the nineteenth century came primarily from expanding cultivated area. It was not until the ...
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One-Quarter of World’s Agriculture Grows in Highly Water-Stressed Areas
All living creatures need two things to survive: food and water. A new WRI analysis shows just how much tension exists between those two essential resources. A new interactive map from WRI’s Aqueduct project reveals that more than 25 percent of the world’s agriculture is grown in areas of high water stress. This figure doubles when looking at irrigated cropland, which produces 40 ...
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Farmers fine-tune research, spread their own innovations
Smallholder farmers can aid the uptake of research fruits and drive grassroots innovations. Joel Winston reports. The 1960s' Green Revolution demonstrated how technological innovations can transform agriculture. High-yielding crop strains, irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides were brought into developing countries, including India and the Philippines, increasing yields by more than 250 per ...
By SciDev.Net
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An experimental approach to compare carbon sequestration rate of four species of legume used as biological façade
Vegetation played an important role in reducing carbon concentration of the environment. Instead of planting horizontally, we attempted to look at planting leguminous plant vertically as biological façade. In tropical climate as in Malaysia, public sensitivity in vertical planting is mostly for aesthetic purposes. This research is focused on selecting vertically grown plant from the point of ...
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A review of the phosphorus content of dry cereal and legume crops of the world
When food scarcity increases, instability in society increases. The majority of food consumed is from cereals and legumes. Phosphorus is essential for crop plant growth and soils are depleted as this element is removed from crop lands with harvested grains/seeds. To sustain yields, inputs of nutrients are required to balance losses. On global and continental/regional bases, we assembled nine ...
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Integrated warm- and cool-season grass and legume pastures: i. seasonal forage dynamics
High temperatures and scarce precipitation often cause the productivity and quality of cool-season pastures in Southwest Michigan to decline for an extended period during the summer. This study was conducted to determine whether integration of switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) or big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii Vitm.) into cool-season grazing systems would mitigate this period of low pasture ...
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Nitrogen contribution from red clover for corn following wheat in western Ohio
Inclusion of a winter legume cover crop into a crop rotation has been suggested as a method to provide a substantial portion of the N requirement of the following crop. While the benefits of winter cover crops such as reduced soil erosion, increased soil organic matter, and increased mulch cover have been well documented, the N contribution to the subsequent crop has shown to be variable. The ...
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Endosperm size diversity in domesticated, wild, and semiwild soybean
Past literature documents that domesticated soybean, Glycine max (L.) Merr., has trivial to almost nonexistent galactomannan-containing endosperm in mature dormant seeds. Current preliminary observations confirm limited endosperm for many domesticated soybean accessions, but show that many others have markedly larger endosperm, as do all wild (G. soja Sieb. & Zucc.) and semiwild (G. gracilis ...
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Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers deplete soil nitrogen: a global dilemma for sustainable cereal production
Received for publication December 19, 2008. Cereal production that now sustains a world population of more than 6.5 billion has tripled during the past 40 yr, concurrent with an increase from 12 to 104 Tg yr–1 of synthetic N applied largely in ammoniacal fertilizers. These fertilizers have been managed as a cost-effective form of insurance against low yields, without regard to the inherent effect ...
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Do mixed-species legume fallows provide long-term maize yield benefit compared with monoculture legume fallows?
The deliberate planting of fast-growing N2–fixing legume monoculture species in rotation with cereal crops can be an important source of N for soil fertility replenishment. We hypothesized that mixed-species fallows have a higher potential of giving long-term residual benefits in terms of biomass, nutrients, and quality of residuals leading to long-term nutrient supply to postfallow maize (Zea ...
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Nitrogen fixation of Sulla under Mediterranean conditions
Sulla coronaria (L.) B.H. Choi & H. Ohashi (=Hedysarum coronarium L.) is a Mediterranean forage legume grown extensively in rainfed Italian environments. Here we report the field quantification of its seasonal and annual N fixation, using the 15N isotopic dilution (ID) method, the influence of various nonfixing reference species on these estimates, and the allocation of fixed N between the ...
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Water use by five warm-season legumes in the southern great plains
Growing warm-season legumes during fallow periods associated with traditional continuous systems of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in the southern Great Plains (SGP) can provide supplemental forage, biological N, and protection from soil erosion, provided the legumes can tolerate drought stress and not deplete the available water in the soil profile. Our objective was to quantify water use ...
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Current and potential development of perennial grasses in rainfed mediterranean farming systems
Past and recent development of perennial grasses in the rainfed Euro-Mediterranean region is reviewed concerning climatic constraints and main types of farming systems. The few Mediterranean cultivars that are registered and available are used for livestock production and cover crops only in subtemperate areas. These cultivars are adapted where annual rainfall exceeds 500 mm and accumulated water ...
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Development and characterization of SSR markers and their use to assess genetic relationships among alfalfa germplasms
Simple sequence repeat (SSR), or microsatellite markers, are codominant, abundant and hypervariable molecular markers from eukaryotic genomes that are being widely used in genetic mapping, phylogenetic studies, and marker-assisted selection. Currently, the number of SSR markers available from alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) genomic libraries is limited. This study was conducted to identify ...
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No persistent changes in pasture vegetation or seed bank composition after fallowing
The practice of fallowing pastures during the growing season is intended to increase plant diversity and allow natural reseeding of forage grasses. Fallowing delivers these benefits in New Zealand, but has been adopted on rotationally stocked farms in the northeastern United States with little or no quantitative assessment. Allowing the pasture to remain ungrazed may allow weedy species to ...
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Plant growth regulator effects on balancing vegetative and reproductive phases in alfalfa seed yield
The use of plant growth regulators (PGRs) has opened new prospects for increased seed production in grasses and legumes, but little information is available on the effects of PGRs on alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) seed production. This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of applying chlormequat chloride (CCC) (2-chloroethyl-trimethyl-ammonium chloride) in combination with five PGRs ...
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Determining the contribution of legumes in legume–grass mixtures using digital image analysis
Digital image analysis could be a rapid and precise technique for estimating legume proportions in grass swards. In 2004, we conducted a pot study to evaluate a digital image analysis (DIA) system for estimation of legume dry matter (DM) contribution in legume–grass mixtures. Examination of pure swards and binary legume–grass mixtures of red clover (Trifolium pratense L.), white clover (T. repens ...
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