Yield Of Agricultural Products Research Articles

Exploration of the Application of Agricultural Intelligent Robots in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

In order to improve agricultural efficiency, reduce labor intensity, and improve the quality and yield of agricultural products on the Tibetan Plateau, this paper takes the application of traditional agricultural robots as an example and proposes the application of agricultural robots to agriculture on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau based on the special breeding environment of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau combined with the current situation of traditional agriculture. Through the application practice of robots in traditional agriculture, the possibility of the application of agricultural robots in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is pointed out, the working methods and advantages of robots in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are expounded, and the application of intelligent agricultural robots in the agriculture of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is discussed and analyzed. The results show that with the progress of science and technology, intelligent robots have gradually played an important role in various fields, and intelligent robots have broad application prospects in plateau agriculture. The application of agricultural robots in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau should be aimed at the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to make some adaptive research and development, intelligent upgrading and demonstration project promotion in order to promote the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau agricultural automation.

Design and implementation of an AI-controlled spraying drone for agricultural applications using advanced image preprocessing techniques

PurposeNowadays, food problems are likely to arise because of the increasing global population and decreasing arable land. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the yield of agricultural products. Pesticides can be used to improve agricultural land products. This study aims to make the spraying of cherry trees more effective and efficient with the designed artificial intelligence (AI)-based agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).Design/methodology/approachTwo approaches have been adopted for the AI-based detection of cherry trees: In approach 1, YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and YOLOv8 models are trained with 70, 100 and 150 epochs. In Approach 2, a new method is proposed to improve the performance metrics obtained in Approach 1. Gaussian, wavelet transform (WT) and Histogram Equalization (HE) preprocessing techniques were applied to the generated data set in Approach 2. The best-performing models in Approach 1 and Approach 2 were used in the real-time test application with the developed agricultural UAV.FindingsIn Approach 1, the best F1 score was 98% in 100 epochs with the YOLOv5s model. In Approach 2, the best F1 score and mAP values were obtained as 98.6% and 98.9% in 150 epochs, with the YOLOv5m model with an improvement of 0.6% in the F1 score. In real-time tests, the AI-based spraying drone system detected and sprayed cherry trees with an accuracy of 66% in Approach 1 and 77% in Approach 2. It was revealed that the use of pesticides could be reduced by 53% and the energy consumption of the spraying system by 47%.Originality/valueAn original data set was created by designing an agricultural drone to detect and spray cherry trees using AI. YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and YOLOv8 models were used to detect and classify cherry trees. The results of the performance metrics of the models are compared. In Approach 2, a method including HE, Gaussian and WT is proposed, and the performance metrics are improved. The effect of the proposed method in a real-time experimental application is thoroughly analyzed.

Study the yield and quality of bitter gourd fruit (Momordica charantia) in inoculation with two species of mycorrhizal fungi and phosphorus fertilizer under different irrigation regimes

Drought is known to be the most important constraint to the growth and yield of agricultural products in the world, and plant symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) can be a way to reduce drought stress negative impacts. A two-year experiment to investigate the factorial combination of mycorrhizal fungi (Glomus mosseae, Glomus intraradices, Control) and phosphorus fertilizer (application and non-application of phosphorus) on fruit yield and phenolic acids changes bitter gourd under different irrigation regimes as a split factorial based on a randomized complete block design. Three irrigation regimes, including irrigation after 20%, 50%, and 80% available soil water content depletion (ASWD), were considered in the main plots. The results showed that under water deficit stress, fruit yield and physiological (photosynthesis rate (Pn), transpiration rate (Tr), stomatal conductance (Gs), RWC, total chlorophyll, and root colonization) parameters decreased compared to 20% ASWD, and biochemical (proline, soluble sugar, MDA, CAT, SOD, phenol) parameters and fruit phenolic acids (caffeic acid, coumaric acid, ferulic acid) increased. However, the inoculation of AMF and phosphorus fertilizer in three irrigation regimes decreased MDA content, but physiological and biochemical parameters and fruit phenolic acids were increased. In this study, the factorial combination of AMF and sufficient phosphorus improved the resistance of bitter gourd to water deficit, and this not only improved fruit yield but also increased fruit phenolic acids under 80% ASWD, which can be an innovation in the management of water resources and the production industry of medicinal plants with high antioxidant properties in water deficit areas.

Soil Pollution Status, Sources and Control Methods in China

Soil is the solid foundation for our survival and development. With the progress of society, our country pays more and more attention to soil pollution. Soil pollution can cause the quality and yield of agricultural products to decline, pollute groundwater and surface water resources, affect air quality, lead to soil pollution in regional areas, and cause the destruction of ecological environment and the sharp decline of biodiversity. These problems will affect China's future sustainable development and social stability, so a detailed analysis of the sources of soil pollution is conducive to analyzing the nature of pollutants and pollution methods, which plays an important role in the prevention and control of soil pollution. And to introduce to the public some new technologies of soil pollution control, new ideas and the future direction of soil remediation.

The concept of a forest as a natural object and an object of legal protection

This scientific article provides a general description of forest resources as an object of administrative and legal research and an object of legal protection, as well as a study of the general concept of a forest and the concept of a forest as an object of legal protection. In modern conditions (aggression from Russia and crimes against ecocide), the issue of forest protection is very relevant. As you know, everything in nature is interconnected and interdependent, so by preserving the forest, we also preserve other natural objects. It has been established that forest resources are wood, technical, medicinal and other forest products that are used to meet the needs of the population and production and are reproduced in the process of forming forest natural complexes.
 An analysis of the concepts of the forest from the point of view of scientists and legal acts was carried out, and the role of the forest and its functions were determined. Our vision of the concept of forest is proposed, namely: a forest is a complex, multifunctional, reproducible object of nature (plant life) and an object of state ownership, which is part of the natural environment and performs two important functions: economic and ecological. The economic includes: the use of wood in economic activities, the use of gifts of the forest (berries, mushrooms, medicinal plants) - in vital activities and human health. Ecological can include the restoration and purification of air in the atmosphere, a positive effect on the regulation of the ecosystem in all territories of Ukraine, from an agricultural point of view, it has a positive effect on the protection of soils from erosion and increases the yield of agricultural products, etc. After all, the possibility of the existence of a forest as such is related to its inherent property, namely: restoration, i.e., a continuous, constantly operating process of vital activity of interconnected organisms that go through a complete life cycle from birth to death with subsequent reproduction.
 The issue of legal protection of forests of Ukraine was also considered, measures were proposed to improve the legal regulation of relations. Based on the analysis of scientists, the features regulating relations in the use and protection of forests have been established. After all, the shortcomings of the national forest legislation and insufficient protection of forests, illegal felling, problems in delimiting the powers of control bodies, ecocide against natural forest objects by the aggressor state lead to the destruction of forests and damage to the surrounding natural environment.

Innovative measurement, trade-off-synergy relationship and influencing factors for agricultural net carbon emissions and effective supply of agricultural products in China

Sensitive zone of global climate change has been formed in China, and it has become a hot topic how can agriculture ensure food security and the supply of important agricultural products while achieving the “Dual Carbon” goal in the country. Based on such background, this paper uses the IPCC carbon emission calculation method, environmental input-output model and economic-water-carbon coefficient method to measure agricultural net carbon emissions, adopts bivariate spatial auto-correlation analysis and SYS-GMM to explore separately the relationship between agricultural net carbon emissions and effective supply of agricultural products, as well as the carbon reduction effect, growth effect and reasonable range of green technology innovation. The results show that: (1) China's agricultural net carbon emissions reveal a spatial distribution of “higher in the east than in the west than in the center” and a temporal characteristic of increasing year by year; China's effective supply of agricultural products shows an increasing trend and a spatial distribution of “higher in the east than in the center than in the west” in 2006–2012 and “higher in the east than in the west than in the center” in 2013–2020. (2) In 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2020, the number of provinces that belong to low-low agglomeration trade-off zone, low-high agglomeration synergy zone, non-significant zone, high-low agglomeration non-trade-off-synergy zone and high-high agglomeration trade-off zone averagely accounted for 12.500 %, 30.000 %, 26.667 %, 9.167 % and 21.667 % of the totality, respectively. (3) The carbon reduction and production growth effects of green technology innovation both show an inverted “U-shape”, and green technology innovation is conducive to both reducing agricultural net carbon emissions and improving supply of agricultural products when it is within a reasonable range of greater than 0.930. (4) Green technology innovation not only has significant spatial and temporal heterogeneity impact, but also exhibits a differential effect on productive agricultural carbon emissions, agricultural trade carbon emissions, agricultural carbon sinks, total output of agricultural products and agricultural net imports in international trade. Therefore, it is proposed that China should establish and improve green technology innovation incubation platforms, guide all participants to ensure the investment and application of green technology products within a reasonable range, formulate and implement regional differential policies and plan in accordance with local conditions, drive ultimately coordinated promotion of agricultural carbon emission reduction and product supply guarantee and lay an important foundation for achieving high-quality economic development and efficient ecological protection.

Impacts of UV radiation on Bacillus biocontrol agents and their resistance mechanisms.

Bacillus biocontrol agent(s) BCA(s) such as Bacillus cereus, Bacillus thuringiensis and Bacillus subtilis have been widely applied to control insects' pests of plants and pathogenic microbes, improve plant growth, and facilitate their resistance to environmental stresses. In the last decade, researchers have shown that, the application of Bacillus biocontrol agent(s) BCA(s) optimized agricultural production yield, and reduced disease risks in some crops. However, these bacteria encountered various abiotic stresses, among which ultraviolet (UV) radiation severely decrease their efficiency. Researchers have identified several strategies by which Bacillus biocontrol agents resist the negative effects of UV radiation, including transcriptional response, UV mutagenesis, biochemical and artificial means (addition of protective agents). These strategies are governed by distinct pathways, triggered by UV radiation. Herein, the impact of UV radiation on Bacillus biocontrol agent(s) BCA(s) and their mechanisms of resistance were discussed.

On the First Kilometer Problem of Agricultural Products Cold Chain Logistics in Huaihua City Considering Green Development

Huaihua has vast land and is the largest prefecture level city in Hunan Province. With abundant natural resources, it is a city with a high output of agricultural products in Hunan Province. The loss and quality of agricultural products during transportation have always been a key concern for farmers and consumers.This article analyzes the problems that exist in the first one kilometer of agricultural product cold chain logistics in Huaihua City, proposes a mobile pre cooling mode to ensure the quality of agricultural products in the first one kilometer, and conducts a simple calculation of its operational return, aiming to solve the problems of high loss and difficult quality assurance in the transportation process of agricultural products.

Modelling Lithuanian family farms’ participation in agri-environmental subsidy schemes: a Neural Network Approach

Properly targeted agri-environmental subsidies (AES) can ensure the implementation of the European Green Deal goals. Hence, it is important to know what factors encourage family farms to participate in the AES schemes in order to select appropriate political tools and properly use the allocated subsidies. We propose a Multilayer Perceptron neural network to examine 34 Lithuanian crop family farms and identify the factors affecting their participation in the AES. The results indicate that the decision by the Lithuanian family farms regarding the participation mainly depends on a few factors, including the agricultural production output of the farm and farmers’ education, while other factors, such as farmer age and farm size, were less important.

Classification of diseases in tomato leaves with Deep Transfer Learning

Plant diseases are important factors because they significantly affect the quality, quantity, and yield of agricultural products. Therefore, it is important to detect and diagnose these diseases at an early stage. The overall objective of this study is to develop an acceptable deep learning model to correctly classify diseases on tomato leaves in RGB color images. To address this challenge, we use a new approach based on combining two deep learning models VGG16 and ResNet152v2 with transfer learning. The image dataset contains 55000 images of tomato leaves in 5 different classes, 4 diseases and one healthy class. The results of our experiment are promising and encouraging, showing that the proposed model achieves 99.08% accuracy in training, 97.66% in validation, and 99.0234% in testing

Impact of climate change on household development resilience: Evidence from rural China

The adverse impacts of climate change have emerged as one of the primary threats to human development; however, the climate change economic impact evaluation literature has mostly estimated effects under an assumption of full certainty. This article aims to estimate the long-run impact of climate change on household development resilience. To do so, we use the China Health and Nutrition Survey, which contains detailed longitudinal socioeconomic information from 1989 to 2015, and matches them to weather data. We find that climate change negatively impacts household development resilience. This negative impact stems from both a decline in upward mobility of households and an increase in downside risks. In other words, the rise in temperatures not only reduces the pace of household economic growth but also amplifies economic volatility, elevating consumption risk for households. The effects are driven by the decrease in agricultural production output and the risk of off-farm income. However, longer-run adaptation has offset 22.09% of the short-run effects of climate change on household development resilience. In contrast, climate adaptation mitigates household welfare loss to a greater extent through agricultural input adjustments and income diversification in the long run.

Greenhouse environmental control target constrained by discrete surface curvature and multi-objective optimization algorithm

Protected greenhouse provides a suitable micro-environment for crop growth, which enhances the quality and yield of agricultural products. How to optimize the greenhouse environment is currently a pressing issue in protected agriculture. In this research, we propose a new environmental control method from the perspectives of crop photosynthesis rate and environmental control cost. The photosynthesis rate data are collected from a nested experiment of tomatoes, and these data are combined with the support vector regression algorithm to establish a photosynthesis rate model. The cost function of greenhouse environmental control is established by theoretical calculation. The non-dominated solution sets of photosynthesis rate and control cost are obtained through an improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm Ⅱ. To determine the optimal solution among the numerous Pareto solutions, the geometric characteristics of the photosynthetic response surface are considered to constrain the control target. Then, a discrete surface curvature method is proposed to computer the constraint region. The intersection between the Pareto solutions and the constraint region is regarded as the environmental control target. The validation experiment demonstrates that the proposed method can effectively enhance photosynthetic accumulation and reduce control cost. Compared to the traditional saturation method, this method achieves a 53% cost reduction while still obtaining 89% photosynthetic accumulation. Compared to the U-chord method, this method increases photosynthetic accumulation by 12% with only a 3% increase in cost. The research has important implications for protected agriculture production.

Dynamics of the Agricultural Water Footprint and the Decoupling Associations with Agricultural Economic Growth in Hangzhou, China

Understanding the relationship between the agricultural water footprint (AWF) and agricultural economic growth (AEG) is of great significance for promoting sustainable agriculture and regional economic development. In this study, we used agricultural statistics data from Hangzhou from 2010 to 2021 to calculate the AWF, predicted the decoupling relationship between the AWF and AEG, and explored the influencing factors of the decoupling relationship between the AWF and AEG. The results showed the following: (1) The AWF in Hangzhou exhibited a decreasing trend, with a reduction from 58.88 × 108 m3 in 2010 to 37.80 × 108 m3 in 2021; this was mainly related to the decline in the water footprints of grain, pork, and egg production. (2) The strong decoupling accounted for 63.64% of the decoupling between the AWF and AEG in Hangzhou during the study period. It was found that an agricultural structure adjustment was the main factor for achieving decoupling between the AWF and AEG. Under the guidance of policy, the decoupling between them could be changed by regulating the output of agricultural products with different water footprint contents per unit. (3) From 2022 to 2026, the AWF in Hangzhou is expected to decrease to 28.21 × 108 m3, while the agricultural economy is projected to increase to CNY 40.008 billion. There will continue to be a strong decoupling status between the AWF and AEG in Hangzhou.

Based on the multi-scale information sharing network of fine-grained attention for agricultural pest detection.

It is of great significance to identify the pest species accurately and control it effectively to reduce the loss of agricultural products. The research results of this project will provide theoretical basis for preventing and controlling the spread of pests and reducing the loss of agricultural products, and have important practical significance for improving the quality of agricultural products and increasing the output of agricultural products. At the same time, it provides a kind of effective prevention and control measures for farmers, so as to ensure the safety and health of crops. Because of the slow speed and high cost of manual identification, it is necessary to establish a set of automatic pest identification system. The traditional image-based insect classifier is mainly realized by machine vision technology, but because of its high complexity, the classification efficiency is low and it is difficult to meet the needs of applications. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a new automatic insect recognition system to improve the accuracy of insect classification. There are many species and forms of insects, and the field living environment is complex. The morphological similarity between species is high, which brings difficulties to the classification of insects. In recent years, with the rapid development of deep learning technology, using artificial neural network to classify pests is an important method to establish a fast and accurate classification model. In this work, we propose a novel convolutional neural network-based model (MSSN), which includes attention mechanism, feature pyramid, and fine-grained model. The model has good scalability, can better capture the semantic information in the image, and achieve more accurate classification. We evaluated our approach on a common data set: large-scale pest data set, PlantVillage benchmark data set, and evaluated model performance using a variety of evaluation indicators, namely, macro mean accuracy (MPre), macro mean recall rate (MRec), macro mean F1-score (MF1), Accuracy (Acc) and geometric mean (GM). Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance and universality ability than the existing algorithm. For example, on the data set, the maximum accuracy we obtained was 86.35%, which exceeded the corresponding technical level. The ablation experiment was conducted on the experiment itself, and the comprehensive evaluation of the complete MSSN(scale 1+2+3) was the best in various performance indexes, demonstrating the feasibility of the innovative method in this paper.

Comprehensive analysis of aflatoxin B1 biosynthesis in Aspergillus flavus via transcriptome-wide m6A methylome response to cycloleucine

Aspergillus flavus and its toxic aflatoxins secondary metabolites contaminate food and grains, posing a severe threat to human health and leading to liver cancer. Here, we demonstrated that cycloleucine blocked aflatoxin B1 synthesis by inhibiting N6-methyladenosine (m6A) methylation modification of messenger RNA (mRNA). m6A Methylation Immunoprecipitation Sequencing (m6A MeRIP-Seq)-based comprehensive transcriptome-wide m6A profiling identified 102 differentially expressed genes that underwent m6A modification, of which 22 hypermethylated genes were downregulated and 49 hypomethylated genes were upregulated, suggesting a negative correlation between m6A methylation and gene expression. Notably, cycloleucine inhibited aflatoxin B1 production via multiple targets. The m6A sites of several key genes involved in the aflatoxin B1 biosynthesis pathway were significantly enriched in the coding sequence and around the stop codon, resulting in their downregulation. Furthermore, m6A methylation on genes related to the aflatoxin B1 biosynthesis pathway led to reduced mRNA stability. Cycloleucine inhibition of aflatoxin B1 production highlights its potential as an agent for removing mycotoxins in environmental pollution. Environmental implicationAflatoxins, highly carcinogenic secondary metabolites produced by Aspergillus flavus, frequently contaminate crops such as peanut, corn, wheat and sesame leading to irreversible loss in the quality and yield of agricultural products and posing serious threats to food safety. Aflatoxins has also been linked to developmental delays and liver cancer in humans. In our study, ‘monitoring aflatoxin concentrations and its bioaccumulation in organisms’ has been conducted. The results demonstrated that aflatoxin production in A. flavus was completely blocked after cycloleucine treatment. Additionally, we demonstrated that inhibition of aflatoxin was linked to N6-methyladenosine methylation of multiple genes in aflatoxin biosynthesis pathway.

The Efficiency of Transfer Learning and Data Augmentation in Lemon Leaf Image Classification

Leaf diseases in trees and plants are important factors that directly affect the yield of agricultural products. This problem may cause a decrease in the production capacity and profitability of farmers. For this reason, computer-aided detection and classification systems are needed to accurately detect plant diseases. In recent years, learning algorithms and image-processing techniques have been used effectively in the agricultural sector. In this study, the efficiency of transfer learning and data augmentation methods on a dataset consisting of lemon leaf images is examined and the classification of diseased and healthy lemon leaf images is performed. In our study, VGG16, ResNet50, and DenseNet201 transfer learning methods were applied both with and without data increment, and the effect of data augmentation on performance was evaluated. Among the deep transfer learning methods used, DenseNet201 gave the highest accuracy rate with 98.29%. This study shows that transfer learning methods can effectively distinguish between diseased and healthy lemon leaves. It has also been observed that data augmentation does not always provide performance improvement. In future studies, it is predicted that it will be appropriate to evaluate the effect of data augmentation more effectively by applying deep transfer learning methods to plants with different class numbers.

Identification and analysis of CdS-RNase in Camellia drupifera: A key determinant of late-acting self-incompatibility

Plant self-incompatibility (SI) is of great significance in reproductive biology and is also the main factor affecting yield in agricultural production. Late-acting self-incompatibility (LSI) is one of the main types of plant SI, but the mechanism of LSI is not systematically analyzed. Tea oil Camellia, a strictly outcrossing plant, is a well-known woody oil cash crop. SI is one of the main reasons for the low yield of tea oil Camellia. In this study, we found that C. drupifera, one of the main species of tea oil Camellia, shows LSI, in which SI occurs in the style, and pollen tube growth in the ovary ceases at 96 h after selfing. The CdS-RNase gene of Camellia drupifera was successfully cloned, and the gene showed a length of 922 bp and encoded 238 amino acids. CdS-RNase had typical S-RNase characteristics. The functional validation results revealed that CdS-RNase was a key female factor for SI in C. drupifera, indicating that S-RNase plays an important role in the plant LSI mechanism. CdS-RNase localized to the cell membrane, was specifically expressed in the style and transferred to the ovary, and inhibited pollen tube growth in the style and ovary. There was an "enhancer factor" for the expression of CdS-RNase in selfing styles. Between 24 h and 48 h after selfing, CdS-RNase expression was significantly upregulated 28.3 times, which was more than 2.5 times higher than the outcross expression level and more than 5 times lower than the cross expression level. A total of 28 CdS-RNase proteins were identified, including 6 CdSm-RNases, and outcrossing among different CdS-RNase genotypes had a significant effect on the fruit setting rate. It may be that mismatches among CdS-RNase genotypes and self-inbreeding are the main reasons for the low yield of C. drupifera. These results provide a basis for the systematic analysis of the LSI mechanism and for solving the SI problem of tea oil Camellia.

ОЦІНКА ВПЛИВУ ІННОВАЦІЙНОГО ПОТЕНЦІАЛУ РЕСУРСОЗАБЕЗПЕЧЕННЯ НА ФІНАНСОВУ ЕФЕКТИВНІСТЬ АГРАРНОГО СЕКТОРА ЕКОНОМІКИ УКРАЇНИ

The purpose of the study is to improve the methodological support for the assessment of the financial efficiency of the agricultural sector of Ukraine under the influence of the innovative potential management of its resource provision. The main scientific methods used in the study are fundamental provisions of the theory of innovation and finance, correlation and multifactor regression analysis, mathematical programming, etc. According to the results of the conducted research the parameter of technological progress as an indicator of the level of innovation development of the agrarian sector of the Ukrainian economy was obtained after modelling of autoregressive multiplicative Tinbergen-Solow production function. The numerical value of the technological progress parameter indicates a potential for additional growth in agricultural output of +0.142%, while other conditions remain unchanged. 23 indicators of the state of the resource provision of the agricultural sector were systematized in 4 groups: the results of the production activity of the agricultural sector (6 indicators), the resource supply of the agricultural sector (8 indicators), the efficiency of the use of resources by agricultural enterprises (4 indicators), and sustainability of the financial condition of agricultural enterprises (5 indicators). A power-law four-factor regression model of the impact of the output volume of the agricultural sector, the value of current assets, return on capital and the current liquidity ratio on the volume of net profit of agricultural enterprises of Ukraine was obtained. It is proved that the elasticity of net profit for agricultural output is 0.01%, for the value of current assets - 1.46%, for capital accumulation - 0.72%, for current liquidity - 3.2%. We constructed the target functions of maximization of the agricultural production output on the basis of the Tinbergen-Solow production function, net profit on the basis of the four-factor power model of net profit, return on equity on the basis of the two-factor DuPont model for the short term. The solving of target functions allowed for maximization of the return on equity of agrarian enterprises of Ukraine only at the expense of the existing innovation potential of production resources and will be used in further research by the authors.

Performance-Evaluation Index for Precision Poverty Alleviation in China’s Shaanxi Province

An effective and accurate poverty-alleviation system is necessary for eradicating poverty and promoting regional economic and social growth. Performance evaluation plays a key role in developing a precise poverty-alleviation policy. However, systematic performance evaluation of precise poverty-alleviation efforts has been largely ignored in the literature. This study sorts the poverty-alleviation performance of 10 major urban areas in Shaanxi Province using the count and analysis method. The empirical findings show that among poverty indexes, the yield of agricultural products has the greatest impact on poverty alleviation. Furthermore, the poverty-alleviation performance of Xianyang, Weinan, and Ankang is relatively high. The efforts of Xi’an and Baoji are at the middle level, and those of Tongchuan and Yan’an are at a relatively low level. This paper identifies the poverty alleviation performance status for each area at the indicator level and then offers a corresponding analysis and proposes countermeasures.

Structural change in the South African agricultural sector: Bai-Perron modelling

There is a consensus that the agricultural sector in developing countries has ascendancy in elevating economic growth through structural change; hence continued improvements are imperative, especially in the case of countries such as South Africa with a low agricultural GDP contribution to the economy. Policymakers have to keep a handle on structural change issues. However, the dawdling research on structural change, particularly in the agricultural sector in South Africa, causes a fallback on the sector's development due to the absence of quality evidence-based policy research. This study analysed structural breaks in the agricultural sector using the value of agricultural production as a variable and then evaluated the effects of economic factors such as employment, exports, government expenditure, and inflation on the value of agricultural production output in the presence of each significant structural break between 1983 and 2020. The Bai-Perron test forecasted two structural break dates (1988 and 1994) in South Africa's agricultural sector. The model results reveal that agricultural exports positively influenced the value of agricultural production output in the resulting two structural change regimes, while employment in agriculture, government expenditure in agriculture, and inflation positively influenced the value of agricultural production output only in the regime 1994–2020. The recommendation is that policy reforms aimed at boosting agricultural exports should be pursued.