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Affordable nutrient solutions for improved food security as evidenced by crop trials.

ABSTRACT: The continuing depletion of nutrients from agricultural soils in Sub-Saharan African is accompanied by a lack of substantial progress in crop yield improvement. In this paper we investigate yield gaps for corn under two scenarios: a micro-dosing scenario with marginal increases in nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) of 10 kg ha(-1) and a larger yet still conservative scenario with proposed N and P applications of 80 and 20 kg ha(-1) respectively. The yield gaps are calculated from a database of historical FAO crop fertilizer trials at 1358 locations for Sub-Saharan Africa and South America. Our approach allows connecting experimental field scale data with continental policy recommendations. Two critical findings emerged from the analysis. The first is the degree to which P limits increases in corn yields. For example, under a micro-dosing scenario, in Africa, the addition of small amounts of N alone resulted in mean yield increases of 8% while the addition of only P increased mean yields by 26%, with implications for designing better balanced fertilizer distribution schemes. The second finding was the relatively large amount of yield increase possible for a small, yet affordable amount of fertilizer application. Using African and South American fertilizer prices we show that the level of investment needed to achieve these results is considerably less than 1% of Agricultural GDP for both a micro-dosing scenario and for the scenario involving higher yet still conservative fertilizer application rates. In the latter scenario realistic mean yield increases ranged between 28 to 85% in South America and 71 to 190% in Africa (mean plus one standard deviation). External investment in this low technology solution has the potential to kick start development and could complement other interventions such as better crop varieties and improved economic instruments to support farmers.

SUBMITTER: van der Velde M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3615004 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Affordable nutrient solutions for improved food security as evidenced by crop trials.

van der Velde Marijn M See Linda L You Liangzhi L Balkovič Juraj J Fritz Steffen S Khabarov Nikolay N Obersteiner Michael M Wood Stanley S

PloS one 20130402 4

The continuing depletion of nutrients from agricultural soils in Sub-Saharan African is accompanied by a lack of substantial progress in crop yield improvement. In this paper we investigate yield gaps for corn under two scenarios: a micro-dosing scenario with marginal increases in nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) of 10 kg ha(-1) and a larger yet still conservative scenario with proposed N and P applications of 80 and 20 kg ha(-1) respectively. The yield gaps are calculated from a database of hist ...[more]

PMID: 23565186

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Project description:BackgroundMalnutrition is a worldwide problem that impacts every country, affecting one in three individuals, including Ghana. According to estimates from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 690 million people were undernourished globally in 2019. Malnutrition is no exception in rural cocoa communities in Ghana. The expansion of cocoa is causing food insecurity and low dietary diversity in most cocoa-growing areas. There is little information on the food security status and dietary diversity among male-headed and female-headed cocoa households in the Juaboso-Bia cocoa landscape. Thus, this study sought to explore the dietary diversity distribution, food security status, sources of staple food, food unavailability periods, food production status, themes contributing to low dietary diversity and food insecurity, and perception of the impact of cocoa expansion on crop diversification among male-headed and female-headed cocoa households in the study area.MethodsBoth quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed to address the research questions. The study collected 200 semi-structured questionnaire data and 14 in-depth interview data from cocoa household heads in the Juaboso-Bia landscape. The survey data was cleaned and analysis, such as household dietary diversity status, food security status, and binary logistic regression were performed in the Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS). The in-depth interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis.ResultsThrough this study, it was revealed that 62.8% of the male-headed cocoa households had medium to high dietary diversity compared to their female counterparts 39.3%. About 47.9% of the male-headed households were food secure than the female-headed households (29.1%). Moreover, the months that both male and female-headed households recalled facing severe food unavailability were July and June. In addition, climate change/variability, unavailable lands, poverty, large household size, and gender stereotypes were themes promoting low dietary diversity and food insecurity among male and female-headed households. Furthermore, sex, total household income, and cropland conversion to cocoa were the variables influencing household heads' perception of the impact of cocoa expansion on crop diversification.ConclusionsThe study showed that the male-headed cocoa households had high dietary diversity and were food secure than the female-headed cocoa households, lending credence to the conceptual framework applied in this study. There is a significant relationship between household head gender and food security status. Therefore, this study recommends the following interventions to improve dietary diversity and food security among male and female-headed cocoa households: raise awareness about the need for diverse diets and provide practical information on how to incorporate a greater variety of food groups into their daily meals; and promote gender equity and inclusivity in food security interventions. Future research could investigate how gender mainstreaming policies in agriculture have helped empower and improve the food security of female-headed households in Ghana.

Project description:Predicting crop yields is a critical issue in agricultural production optimization and intensification research. Accurate foresights of natural circumstances a year in advance can have a considerable impact on management decisions regarding crop selection, rotational location in crop rotations, agrotechnical methods employed, and long-term land use planning. One of the most important aspects of precision farming is sustainability. The novelty of this study is to evidence the effective of the temperature, pesticides, and rainfall environment parameters in the influence sustainable agriculture and economic efficiency at the farm level in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, predicting the future values of main crop yield in Saudi Arabia. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to estimate the impact of environment factors and agrotechnical parameters on agricultural crop yields and to anticipate yields is examined in this study. Using artificial neural networks (ANNs), a highly effective multilayer perceptron (MLP) model was built to accurately predict the crop yield, temperature, insecticides, and rainfall based on environmental data. The dataset is collected from different Saudi Arabia regions from 1994 to 2016, including the temperature, insecticides, rainfall, and crop yields for potatoes, rice, sorghum, and wheat. For this study, we relied on five different statistical evaluation metrics: the mean square error (MSE), the root-mean-square error (RMSE), normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), Pearson's correlation coefficient (R%), and the determination coefficient (R 2). Analyses of datasets for crop yields, temperature, and insecticides led to the development of the MLP models. The datasets are randomly divided into separate samples, 70% for training and 30% for testing. The best-performing MLP model is characterized by values of (R = 100%) and (R 2 = 96.33) for predicting insecticides in the testing process. The temperature, insecticides, and rainfall were examined with different crop yields to confirm the effectiveness of these parameters for increasing product crop yields in Saudi Arabia; we found that these items had highest relationships. The average values are R = 98.20%, 96.50, and 99.14% with for the temperature, insecticides, and rainfall, respectively. Based on these findings, it appeared that each of the parameter categories that are considered (temperature, pesticides, and rainfall) had a similar contribution to the accuracy of anticipated yield projection.

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Affordable nutrient solutions for improved food security as evidenced by crop trials.

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Affordable nutrient solutions for improved food security as evidenced by crop trials.

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