eChapters

Abstract

India, ranks first in marigold production among the loose flowers followed by chrysanthemum, jasmine and tuberose. Today, there is huge demand for natural colours of marigold, calendula, hibiscus, Petunia etc.in the international market.
 
A study on primary data was done to examine the production and marketing cost and profitability of marigold flowers. Data were collected through multistage sampling technique from farmers of Bhaderwah tehsil of Doda district in Jammu And Kashmir State.

Anthracnose

Colletotrichum lindemuthianum (Sacc. & Magnus)

Glomerella lindemuthianum Shear

Economic Importance

• Anthracnose warrants a serious attention as it inflicts heavy economic losses to the crop, which may reach up to 100%, under conducive conditions.
• In India disease incidence has been reported to vary between 24.59 to 51.72 per cent.
• In Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir state disease incidence of 63.46% was recorded.

Growth of urban population has become a challenge throughout the world. Presently, many of the cities are featured with high rising buildings, rush of vehicular traffic and networking of industrial establishments. The urban ecological footprints are increasing day-by-day resulting in unfavourable living conditions. The cities require vast area of land to sustain the population for requirement of food, clothing and other requirements. All these items are brought from areas outside the city, may be from far or near. Creating avenue for production of food and other materials in and around the cities will certainly minimize the pressure on land available outside the city areas. The urban sustainability is at threat due to environmental pollution, rising population and intensification of non-green activities. Many cities have natural resources such as water bodies, inherent vegetation, open space, etc.; which can be appropriately utilized for productive purpose. Promotion of urban agriculture in the form of growing crops, planting trees rearing animals and encouraging landscape garden will have long term impact on urban ecosystem. This can prevent environmental degradation, ensure supply of fresh food and improvement in urban life.

Introduction

In shrimp farming practice, the production cost of shrimps mainly depends on the feed cost and its associated water quality management issues. Hence, the success of shrimp aquaculture is wholly depends on the feed input cost and this feed cost involved can be reduced to a greater extent by enhancing the organic productivity of the ponds, particularly by enhancing the plankton productivity, which include, the assemblages of phytoplankton and zooplankton.

Introduction

Soil is a complex system consisting of physical, chemical and biological components. These components dynamically interact making it functional to sustain life. All life forms rely on soil microbial processes for their survival. Microbial diversity in the soil is greater than the diversity of any other group of organisms existing in the earth. Microbes as inhabitant of soil are responsible for diverse metabolic functions that affect soil and plant health (Table 1).

Quality of silage is determined by nutrients content and intake potential of the silage. High quality silage is a stable feed, made from high quality pasture, which is preserved in the absence of oxygen by a high quality fermentation, to minimize any loss of feeding value. It is not possible to produce high quality silage from low quality pasture, no matter how good the fermentation is. The silage quality is generally used to indicate the success of fermentation and not to evaluate the feeding value of the silage. However, the fermentation quality and nutritional value of the silage are usually highly correlated because a poor fermentation can result in great loss of the digestible nutrients (Sutoh et al., 1970; Uchida and Sutoh, 1973). Therefore, both the quality of the ensiled pasture and the quality of the fermentation must be considered.

A new buzz-word is rapidly spreading through the manufacturing and analytical environment. Discussions on the application of Non Invasive Research namely the Near Infrared (NIR) Spectroscopy are often found on the agenda of production, project, and technical and even board meetings. Engineers and chemists are confronted more frequently with the challenge to decide whether a NIR instrument will be the solution to their production quality control and other analytical problems. Are there really amazing machines that can determine protein, fat, moisture, fibre, starch, nicotine, alcohol, sugar, amino acids and whatever analyses you require on any product from foodstuff to fertilizer and animal feeds in less than a minute and so simple to operate that even the unskilled labourer can handle it? In this article we will endeavor to answer the questions that often crop up in the evaluation of NIR as an analytical technique towards Natural Products.

Mites are small arthropods belonging to the sub-class Acari (also known as Acarina) and the class Arachnida. The scientific discipline devoted to the study of ticks and mites is called acarology. In soil ecosystems, mites are favored by high organic matter content and by moist conditions, wherein they actively engage in the fragmentation and mixing of organic matter (Nyle and Ray, 2009).

2.1 Introduction

Agro-meteorological advisories relate the past, current and predicted future weather to agricultural activities. Behaviour of weather both in space and time, considerably affect the agricultural production. Year to year variations in crop production are generally depended to the abnormalities in the behaviours of weather. The mission of the Agromet Advisory Services (AAS) of NCMRWF is to maximise farmers’ profits by decreasing losses due to weather calamities and also by increasing the timeliness of operations in the crop field. An ideal AAS bulletin helps to reduce environmental pollution through the optimum use of chemicals in the crop filed. An ideal AAS bulletin should contain farm management information to weather based agricultural operations and available to the farmers in real time.

This chapter covers plant breeding’s present, past, and future prospects with a special emphasis on cultivar development. In order to increase agricultural production and productivity (yield per unit area) of important crops, plant breeders have achieved significant achievements in the genetic enhancement of yield, adaptive features, disease–pest resistance, abiotic stress tolerance, and nutritional qualities. Plant breeding is more crucial than ever to address production issues in order to provide a steady supply of food, feed, and fiber due to the growing demands of the human population and rising climate fluctuations. Now a days plant breeders have advanced tools to create superior cultivars because of recent technological developments in the fields of phenomics, genomics, and biotechnology. This chapter has covered important topics of crop domestication, pre-Mendelian and post Mendelian plant breeding, plant breeding in the 20th and 21st centuries, including information on the green revolution, genetically engineered crops, molecular marker applications, image-based phenotyping, machine learning techniques, and the relationship between both public and private plant breeding organizations, and future plant breeding efforts.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization designed to supervise and liberalize international trade. It was established on 1^st January 2005 and is responsible for making and enforcing rules for trade between nations. WTO marks a major change in global trade rules. As an organization, it replaces the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which had been in existence since 1947. The Eighth Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations under GATT, which started in Uruguay in 1986, was concluded in 1994, leading to the creation of WTO as the new permanent international trade organization. The role of WTO is much more extensive than that of GATT, which dealt with trade in goods. Apart from goods, the two other broad areas that WTO covers are services and intellectual property, which previously belonged to the domestic domain. Accordingly, WTO administers not only the Multilateral Trade Agreements (MTAs) in goods but also the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which came into existence with WTO. All the agreements annexed to the Agreement establishing the WTO were signed as part of a package deal. Member countries did not have the option of choosing some and rejecting others. Another important difference with the erstwhile GATT is that WTO has a stronger compliance mechanism than did GATT-a member’s failure to meet the obligations can invoke retaliation across agreements and sectors.

Introduction

Nano science is the study of the properties of structures of the size smaller than several hundreds of nano meter (nm). Nanotechnology consists in techniques for designing and manufacturing these structures as well as applications arising from these. The development of nanoscience and nanotechnology is in line with the trend towards miniaturisation. As nanoscience and nanotechnology developed, they make the barriers between traditional scientific and technological disciplines more permeable.

Silage fermentation is a dynamic process involving interactions among the forage, microbial populations and the ensiling environment. A good fermentation process is not only dependent on the type and quality of the forage crop, but also on the harvesting and ensiling technique. There are various factors that influence the fermentation process and ultimately the nutrient composition and quality of ensiled feed. These are as follows:

1. Plant Factors

Forage characteristics at the time of ensiling are the predominant factor which determines the final quality of silage. Factors such as type of forage to be ensiled, maturity, DM content and WSC content of that forage, all influence the ease of ensiling and ultimately the quality of silage that is produced.

A hernia is the protrusion of an organ through a defect in the wall of the abdominal cavity in which it lies.

Classification
1. On the Basis of Anatomical Site
    Abdominal (umbilical and ventral)
    Diaphragmatic

Introduction

The basic principle of conservation agriculture is to minimize soil disturbance in order to stabilize the soil structure, increase the fertility and balance the eco-system. Applied together, conservation agriculture practices – no tillage, permanent soil cover, use of crop cover and crop rotation, residue management- have complementary positive outcomes; no tillage maintains soil structure and biological activity; a permanent soil cover protects the soil surface from erosion and creates a stable and favourable micro-climate; cover crops and residue management provides organic matter, reduce soil erosion and improves soil fertility. Management of the soil water balance should be considered as a positive for cover crops and improvement of soil water infiltration, reduction in soil water evaporation, and decreasing water extraction from the soil would impact subsequent plant growth.

MOST OF THE ENERGY FOR LIFE COMES FROM SUNLIGHT

Total rate of energy delivery from sun to earth (at the top of the atmosphere) = 175,000 terrawatts

Terrawatt = 10^12 watts

Rate of energy capture by plants from the sun = net primary productivity (NPP) = 100 terrawatts

Only ~ 0.06% of sunlight is captured

Captured in chemical bonds, especially in sugar

Small amounts of energy are available to specialized microorganisms from chemical reactions not linked to sunlight

It is estimated that 99% of the energy used by living cells comes from the sun

Incorporation of sunlight into chemical bonds occurs through the process of photosynthesis

“Invented” by cyanobacteria about 2 billion years ago

Rice

Plant parasitic nematodes cause serious damage to rice crop. Thirty two species belonging to 13 genera were observed in association with the crop. Among them few are considered to be important. They are the rice white - tip nematode (Aphelenchoides besseyi), rice stem nematode (Ditylenchus angustus), rice root nematode (Hirschmanniella oryzae), root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne graminicola) and the cyst nematode (Heterodera oryzicola).

The white-tip nematode (Aphelenchoides besseyi)

The yield loss due to the white-tip nematode is estimated to be as much as 17.4 to 54.1 per cent. The nematode is distributed in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, Former USSR, Italy, Cuba and Madagascar.

For achieving the inclusive and sustainable development of the tribal communities in the selected areas we believe that imparting technical know-how of improved agricultural practices, development of vocational skills among rural resource-poor schedule tribes and ensuring the availability of quality technological input material will be instrumental. Considering these facts, in order to enhance the livelihood of the tribal communities in the selected district of Bihar this intervention project was designed with the following objectives.

Salicyclic acid: Salicyclic acid (from Latin salix, willow tree, from the substances used to be obtained) is aminohydroxybenzoic acid, a type of phenolic acid and a beta hydracid. It has the formula C₇H₆O₃. This colourless crystalline organic acid is widely used in organic synthesis and function as a plant hormone. It is derived from the metabolic of salicin. In addition to being an important active metabolic of aspirin (acetylsalicyclic acid), which acts in part as a prodrug to salicyclic acid, it is probably best known for its use as a key ingredient in topical anti-acne products. The salts and esters of salicyclic acid are known as salicylates.

Salination: The process of accumulation of soluble salts in the soil.

Saline adaptation: Genetic modification of individuals in a population that increases their ability to survive excess salt.

Saline adjustment: Physiological and biochemical changes of individual plants that increase their ability to survive excess salt.

Introduction Garden Pea (Pisum sativum L.) is a small, round, green seed that is commonly eaten as a vegetable. It is a legume, which means it is part of the same family as beans, lentils, and peanuts. Its chromosome number is 2n=14. Peas are typically eaten fresh, frozen, or canned, and are often used in soups, stews, and casseroles. They are a good source of protein, fiber, various vitamins and minerals. Peas can be grown in a garden or farm and it is considered a staple food in many countries. Origin and Distribution Garden peas have a long history of cultivation and have been enjoyed as a food source for centuries. The exact origin of garden peas is believed to be in Central Asia. The distribution of garden peas expanded as they were introduced to different regions and adapted to various climates. They were brought to Europe during ancient times and became popular as a staple crop in many countries. The cultivation of garden peas also spread to Asia, Africa, and the Americas through the process of exploration and colonization. In modern times, garden peas are grown globally in both temperate and cool climates.