Agricultural Revolution Research Articles

“To Multiply Corn Two-Hundred-Fold”

Abstract Agricultural reform movements proliferated in seventeenth-century Europe. For many who sought to make farming more economically productive, the practices of chymistry offered a way to accomplish these goals. Placed in the context of the development of a “vegetable philosophy,” or a theory of generation and growth across mineralogical and botanical domains, this article examines the application of chymical techniques in the attempt to enhance wheat seeds through seed-steeping and “fructifying” experiments among seventeenth-century agricultural reformers, particularly in England. I focus on three main sources: instructional husbandry manuals describing how to create “fructifying waters” to fertilize these seeds, the writings of Hugh Plat and Francis Bacon detailing their experiments on wheat seed germination, and the manuscript notebooks and correspondences of the Hartlib Circle, a group of natural philosophers, alchemists, and agricultural reformers who attempted to put these ideas into practice in the 1640s and 1650s. Their attempt to develop an artificial fertilizer regime for important cereal crops like wheat played a small but crucial role in the origins of the British Agricultural Revolution in the seventeenth century.

CubeSat constellations provide enhanced crop phenology and digital agricultural insights using daily leaf area index retrievals

Satellite remote sensing has great potential to deliver on the promise of a data-driven agricultural revolution, with emerging space-based platforms providing spatiotemporal insights into precision-level attributes such as crop water use, vegetation health and condition and crop response to management practices. Using a harmonized collection of high-resolution Planet CubeSat, Sentinel-2, Landsat-8 and additional coarser resolution imagery from MODIS and VIIRS, we exploit a multi-satellite data fusion and machine learning approach to deliver a radiometrically calibrated and gap-filled time-series of daily leaf area index (LAI) at an unprecedented spatial resolution of 3 m. The insights available from such high-resolution CubeSat-based LAI data are demonstrated through tracking the growth cycle of a maize crop and identifying observable within-field spatial and temporal variations across key phenological stages. Daily LAI retrievals peaked at the tasseling stage, demonstrating their value for fertilizer and irrigation scheduling. An evaluation of satellite-based retrievals against field-measured LAI data collected from both rain-fed and irrigated fields shows high correlation and captures the spatiotemporal development of intra- and inter-field variations. Novel agricultural insights related to individual vegetative and reproductive growth stages were obtained, showcasing the capacity for new high-resolution CubeSat platforms to deliver actionable intelligence for precision agricultural and related applications.

Consumption, Wellness, and the Far Right

Consumption, Wellness, and the Far Right

Digital Technology Boosting Agricultural Supply-Side Constitutive Revolution in Poor Areas Based on the Intelligent Environment of the Internet of Things

China is a big agricultural country, and China’s agricultural development is related to the development of the country. Especially in poor rural areas, the development of agriculture still stays at low-level manual farming. Therefore, with the help of the developed Internet of Things technology, it is necessary for digital technology to develop and reform the rural areas in poverty-stricken areas. This paper aims to promote the supply-side structural revolution of agriculture in poverty-stricken areas by digital technology based on intelligent environment of Internet of Things. Firstly, the KNN intelligent algorithm is improved to improve the accuracy and reduce the time complexity. Then, based on the data support of Internet of Things technology, a prediction model is built, and the parameters are optimized by particle swarm optimization, and finally the best prediction model with high prediction accuracy, good stability and reduced prediction time complexity is obtained. Taking the source area of the Danjiang River in the South-to-North Water Transfer Project as the research object, the total grain output and soybean production demand in this area from 2010 to 2018 were selected, and the change trend of soybean production and demand in this area from 2019 to 2021 was predicted. The experimental data show that the soybean output in this region has increased year by year, with a cumulative increase of 6,985.4 tons from 2010 to 2018. Soybean output sometimes exceeds demand, and sometimes it is less than demand. There will be an oversupply situation in 2019 and 2021, and an oversupply situation in 2020. Therefore, the prediction model of Internet of Things can effectively predict the supply and demand situation of soybean with an accuracy rate of over 90%, which can provide data support for the decision-making of structural change of agricultural supply side in poverty-stricken areas.

MOBILE USER INTERFACE DESIGN FOR SMALLHOLDER AGRICULTURE TO BE A SMART FARMER: A SCOPING REVIEW

Mobile user interface (UI) design plays a very important role in determining an application that can be adopted by all types of users, especially those residing in rural areas. This review aims to provide a mapping of previously published studies on mobile UI design application for smallholder agriculture to be a smart farmer. The focus of this scoping review is on the design elements of the proposed UI, strategies of inquiry used and to find out if there is a UI design that involves geospatial context by published articles. The results show that interview and observation are the most common field study methods used to obtain information in designing mobile UI, and the most widely applied UI elements are audio and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). There are many user interface elements that can be used by farmers who have different skills level in dealing with mobile technology. Icon interface is an important element in designing mobile UI for rural farmers based on previous results. Other than that, the use of location function in mobile UI design shows an upward trend where three recent articles used location function to report crop pest and disease and determine the nearest market location. In addition, there is a need to design geospatial elements such as map for mobile UI that match the skills of rural farmers to support the fourth Industrial Revolution in agriculture to be a smart farmer.

The Africa Green Revolution, Achievements, and Challenges in Agriculture

After the second Agricultural revolution in England, the third green revolution was started in India between 1955 to 1960s to increase food production and feed the millions of malnourished people throughout the nation and quickly spread to other countries. Green revolution emerged because of thinking about populations and the problem of hunger in very particular ways. Many Asian and other countries were immediately adopted the green revolution and accelerated the growth and poverty reduction dramatically. Africa has the potential for a green revolution but due to too late acceptance of the green revolution yet the yields are far below their potential and the use of modern inputs such as fertilizer and high-yielding varieties of seeds is extremely low. Therefore, to increase productivity and eliminate poverty from the people the focus of the Green Revolution for developing countries, especially for Africa is mandatory. Keywords : Africa, Agriculture, green revolution DOI: 10.7176/JBAH/12-5-03 Publication date: March 31 st 2022

Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture

Abstract: Agriculture Sector plays important role in economic sector. The artificial intelligence is main concern and the emerging subject all across world. And population increasing day by day and with the increasing demand employment and food is also increasing. Our traditional method which was used by the farmer were not sufficient enough to fulfill the requirements. Consequently, synthetic intelligence technique is added. This method supplied meals requirement and employment possibilities to many people. Artificial Intelligence in agriculture has added associate agriculture revolution. This generation has covered the crop yield from different factors like weather adjustments, populace increase, employment problems, and meals protection issues. This era includes crop yields caused by various factors such as climate change, population surge, employment issues, and food security issues. The main difficulty of the document is to verify the many artificial intelligence applications in agriculture, including irrigation, weeding and spraying integrated with sensors and other tools used in robots and drones. These technologies can save extra water, the use of pesticides and herbicides, maintain soil fertility, and also help to effectively use manpower, increase productivity, and improve service quality. Implementation of automation in agriculture, the weeding structures thru robots and drones. The diverse soil water sensing techniques are mentioned together with computerized weeding techniques. The implementation of drones is mentioned, the diverse techniques utilized by drones for spraying and crop-tracking is likewise mentioned on this paper Keywords: Image recognition, cognitive science, deep learning, sematic analysis, Neural network

On Shaky Ground

On Shaky Ground

Images on Halaf Pottery from Syria

Pottery marked the advent of the agricultural revolution, transition to sedentary life, and a new era of intellectual development. Man used pottery to communicate important ideas in symbolic form. This article presents examples of ancient art, in particular, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic images on pottery. The research featured ceramic vessels found at the archaeological sites of Halaf culture in Syria. The research objective was to interpret their meaning using various descriptive and analytical methods. The author believes that the ancient potter used animal images out of reverence or fear. Animal images on pottery point at the close interaction between people, animals, and nature.

Can digital solutions transform agri-food systems in Africa?

ABSTRACT Digital agriculture solutions hold a promise to build agri-food food systems that are more efficient, environmentally sustainable, and inclusive, thereby contributing to the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. In most African countries, the rapid adoption of mobile phones and other digital tools have accelerated the deployment of agricultural services for farmers and other value chain actors resulting in enhanced access to information, knowledge, financial services, markets, and farm tools. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to fast-track the deployment of contact-free digital solutions along the agri-food value chains. Despite the numerous opportunities presented by the digital agricultural revolution, its potential to transform agri-food systems in Africa remains uncertain. With a broad perspective on Africa, this paper explores the emerging evidence on digital agricultural services including key drivers, evidence on impact, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper concludes with some implications for policy makers and professionals in agricultural economics.

Anything Grows: Some Remarks On "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow

The article is a detailed review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. The author maps out a problematic context of world history as it is being written nowadays. So called Anthropocene basically means the impossibility of world history written exclusively from a human point of view. Now, world history is to be written from the perspective of a NonHuman Other (be it carbon footprint, microbes, technology, and so on). Moreover, this Other is regularly elaborated within the framework of big data. Graeber and Wengrow contest this trend, but, at the same time, endorse it by other means. NonHuman Other, chosen by the authors, is the human race itself in its “indigenous” state. Data, accumulated by archeology and anthropology, allows them to refute and ridicule the narrative of “Agricultural revolution” which suggested a sudden shift from hunters’ and foragers’ way of life to first farmers with their sedentary existence conducive to highly hierarchized societies and centralization. But Graeber and Wengrow overlook the fact that any narrative always functions as a skeletal generalization, and it is the reason why their arguments sometimes reveal misunderstanding of stylistic and strategic peculiarities of different types or genres of parascientific writing (including punditry). Graeber and Wengrow do not substitute any other narrative for “Agricultural revolution”, they content themselves with undermining it by a plethora of anthropological data presenting a multitude of outliers communities. Striving to dismantle the basics of Rousseauist myth (implying abundance of indigenous life and “fall” into civilization), the authors actually rehabilitate it, at least partially. So native Americans supposedly lived in a much freer and richer society that we do. At the end of the day, the culprit of the fall into a civilized state is declared to be a tripartite power taken almost for granted.

A Cloud-Based Framework for Agricultural Data Integration: A Top-Down-Bottom-Up Approach

In recent years, growing use of information technology (IT) and the big data revolution in agriculture have led many farms to adopt precision agriculture methods and to accumulate large amounts of data. Exploiting these data for effective decision support requires the ability to integrate data from various sources, to conveniently analyze the data, and to infer valuable insights. This paper presents a framework for integrating and analyzing agricultural data from various sources, which leverages cloud-computing, thereby contributing to the scalability, flexibility, affordability, and maintainability of the solution compared to existing solutions. The framework defines a functional infrastructure of cloud-based services that facilitate integration, analysis, and data visualization. These services can be either end-user applications or services intended as a platform for creating new services. To design the framework’s architecture, we applied a top-down and bottom-up approach. Based on the top-down analysis of information collected through interviews, questionnaires, and literature review, we defined an initial architecture of the framework. We then used this initial architecture to develop different applications, and based on the experience and insights gained and new requirements that were faced, the architecture was revised in an iterative process. We demonstrate the application of the framework through several use cases. Each use case represents different data integration requirements and is based on different services of the proposed framework.

Machine Learning Applications in Agriculture

Agriculture plays a vital role in the economic growth of the country. To meet out the food requirement of the increase of population is a challenging task with frequent changes in climatic conditions and limited resources. Smart farming have emerged as an innovative tool to address current challenges in agricultural sustainability. The mechanism that drives this cutting edge technology is machine learning (ML). It gives the machine has the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Machine Learning together with IoT (Internet of Things) enabled farm machinery are key components of the next agriculture revolution. Machine Learning applications in the field of agriculture are explained in this article. The areas that are focused are prediction of soil parameters such as moisture content, crop yield prediction, disease and weed detection in crops, Identify water stress in plant, Crop mapping , Crop selection prediction , Ground water level prediction: Groundwater is the largest storage of freshwater resources, which serves as the and species detection. Intelligent irrigation which includes drip irrigation and intelligent harvesting techniques are also discussed to reduces human labour to a great extent. This article demonstrates how knowledge-based agriculture can improve the sustainable productivity and quality of the product.

The problem of providing the urban population with agricultural products

The provision of agricultural products in full at the moment is especially relevant due to the deterioration of the political situation in the world around the Russian Federation. The cessation of deliveries of food and other goods from Western countries has set before Russia the task of overcoming import dependence. Therefore, the main goal now is to strengthen food independence at the expense of domestic production. The food security doctrine is aimed at gradually reducing the dependence of the agro-industrial complex not only on imported products, but also on imported machinery and equipment. Threshold values for the production of domestic products are also set. For grain, this figure is 95%. The same figure for potatoes. For milk and dairy products, the indicator should be at least 90%. For meat products - 85%, for sugar, vegetable oil and fish products - at least 80%. New technologies play a big role in this. New technologies in agriculture are innovations that take agriculture to a new level. The new agricultural revolution is the application of IT technologies in agriculture, which are designed to reduce the amount of manual labor and increase product yields. For these purposes, biotechnology, logistics, processing technologies are used.

TasselNetV3: Explainable Plant Counting With Guided Upsampling and Background Suppression

Fast and accurate plant counting tools affect revolution in modern agriculture. Agricultural practitioners, however, expect the output of the tools to be not only accurate but also explainable. Such explainability often refers to the ability to infer which instance is counted. One intuitive way is to generate a bounding box for each instance. Nevertheless, compared with counting by detection, plant counts can be inferred more directly in the local count framework, while one thing reproaching this paradigm is its poor explainability of output visualization. In particular, we find that the poor explainability becomes a bottleneck limiting the counting performance. To address this, we explore the idea of guided upsampling and background suppression where a novel upsampling operator is proposed to allow count redistribution, and segmentation decoders with different fusion strategies are investigated to suppress background, respectively. By integrating them into our previous counting model TasselNetV2, we introduce TasselNetV3 series: TasselNetV3-Lite and TasselNetV3-Seg. We validate the TasselNetV3 series on three public plant counting data sets and a new unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV)-based data set, covering maize tassels counting, wheat ears counting, and rice plants counting. Extensive results show that guided upsampling and background suppression not only improve counting performance but also enable explainable visualization. Aside from state-of-the-art performance, we have several interesting observations: 1) a limited-receptive-field counter in most cases outperforms a large-receptive-field one; 2) it is sufficient to generate empirical segmentation masks from dotted annotations; 3) middle fusion is a good choice to integrate foreground–background <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">a priori</i> knowledge; and 4) decoupling the learning of counting and segmentation matters.

The Hobbit and the Hermeneutics of the Barnyard

The Hobbit and the Hermeneutics of the Barnyard Nathan Kowalsky (bio) The Mirkwood Elves in The Hobbit subvert the broadly agrarian landscape hermeneutics which the rest of Tolkien's classic book (along with the fantasy genre more generally) reinforces. These Elves represent a healing of the breach between Civilization and the Wild more effectively than Tolkien was able to achieve with the competing Baggins and Took instincts in Bilbo. As such, the Mirkwood Elves present an opportunity for reconciliation between indigenous peoples and Westerners who might otherwise perpetuate the narrative of heroic conquest in their own fairy stories. To make this case, I must begin with an excursus into philosophical anthropology, specifically the landscape hermeneutics of agrarian material culture. The first part of this paper, therefore, does not concern The Hobbit, but rather the theoretical framework I am applying to it: the hermeneutics of the barnyard. While scholarly notice of this hermeneutics began in the late 1950s and continues to be fruitfully advanced in modern scholarship (for example, in James C. Scott's 2017 work on early political states), it is usually underappreciated or overlooked. Readers may be unfamiliar with the hermeneutics of the barnyard—even though it structures vast stretches of the Western tradition—and so a fairly detailed sketch of its main outlines is needed to provide a basis of application to Tolkien's Hobbit. The payoff for this approach comes in sections two and three. In section two, I show how The Hobbit embodies many salient aspects of the barnyard hermeneutic, from the bucolic scenes of domestic life in Bag End to the subterranean hells of Goblin-town under the Misty Mountains. In section three, I argue that the Elves of Mirkwood (and to a lesser extent, the Elves of Rivendell) rupture the barnyard hermeneutic by being "Good People." Even though they dwell in the Wilderland's forest of darkness and evil, the Elves expose a crack in the agrarian dualisms that characterize the rest of the novel. I then conclude by gesturing towards ways in which this Elvish fracturing can contribute "to a truer and more perilous Faërie" (Hillman 37) than perhaps even Tolkien envisioned. [End Page 47] I. The Hermeneutics of the Barnyard As early as 1958, the radical environmental theorist Paul Shepard proposed the Neolithic Revolution as the decisive event in humanity's ecological and intellectual history. Agriculture profoundly affected—and continues to affect—both our species' relationship to the land and the symbolic renderings of that relationship. Agriculture (including horticulture, tillage, and herding)1 is a manipulative technique applied to animals, plants, or landscapes which aims at the production of greater quantities of food than foraging for pre-existing food sources can achieve. While it permitted exponential population growth and (with the exception of nomadic pastoralism) required human sedentism, the agricultural revolution lowered human nutritional intake and life expectancy, caused soil depletion and salinization, accelerated erosion, and removed native flora and fauna in favor of domesticated cultivars and livestock. Moreover, the agrarian task-scape fostered the belief that "the subjugation of nature, and the domination and manipulation of living creatures" was normal, natural, and essential to the human condition (Serpell 175). Moreover, because the land and its denizens do not naturally conform to being managed, cultures founded on agriculture tend to frame the world in terms of oppositions that valorize whatever lies within a farmer's control and denigrate that which lies outside it. Shepard identifies this dualistic value schema as an "ethic of the barnyard" (60–61), whereby animals are expected to behave according to norms dictated by life in an enclosure. For example, aggression is counter-productive when living inside a pen with other animals; domesticated (literally "house-trained") livestock are therefore artificially selected for docility. Predators, however, wreak havoc in pens of docile animals, stealing the lives of the stock from the farmer. This violence makes their predatory instincts appear bloodthirsty, vicious (i.e., "filled with vice"), and opposed to the perceived peace, harmony, and order of the fenced settlement. Ethically, therefore, animals are expected to behave in ways conducive to life on the farm (from the French, ferme, "[en]closed"); virtuous behavior follows the dictates...

The Role of Sheep Husbandry During the Arab Agricultural Revolution in Medieval Sicily (7th-14th C. Ad)

The Role of Sheep Husbandry During the Arab Agricultural Revolution in Medieval Sicily (7th-14th C. Ad)

Towards a Blockchain-Based Smart Farm Agricultural Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa is considered one of the agricultural superpowers, with 60% of the global arable land. As a result of the increase in the population and the growing demand for agricultural products, the agri-food sector is resorting to the use of New Technologies of Information and Communication. With the fourth industrial revolution, it is now possible to integrate technologies such as the Blockchain and the Internet of Things into the activities of the agricultural sector. This study aims to show how the blockchain can improve the practice of intelligent agriculture in Africa. For these, two research questions will guide this reflection. The results obtained a state where Blockchain technology has begun to make its first appearances in some African states thanks to its advantages. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the blockchain is still facing various internal and external challenges in the African States, where the proposal for some slopes to make the blockchain a real asset for the African agri-food sector.

Enhancing smart farming through the applications of Agriculture 4.0 technologies

Agriculture 4.0 represents the fourth agriculture revolution that uses digital technologies and moves toward a smarter, more efficient, environmentally responsible agriculture sector. Agricultural technologies have emerged to enhance sustainability and discover more effective farm methods. This encompasses all digitalisation and automation processes in business and our daily lives, including Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots, the Internet of Things (IoT), and virtual and augmented reality. These technological advancements are having a profound impact on our lives. From a technical standpoint, it brings us to precision agriculture. This provides a data-driven strategy for efficiently growing and maintaining crops on cultivable land, enabling farmers to use most of the resources at their disposal. Throughout the supply chain, daily operations create massive volumes of data. Most of this information was previously untouched, but with the help of big data technologies, such information can be used to improve the performance and production of any crop. Depending on the crop type and its growth needs, digitised harvesters can help handle huge areas in various situations, particularly agriculture. This paper is brief about Agriculture 4.0 and its condition. Smart farming, Various key technologies and specific domains for the Exploring Agriculture 4.0 Domain are discussed in detail and, finally, identified and discussed significant applications of Agriculture 4.0 technologies. These technologies are essential to our lives since they simplify our daily duties without recognising them. In Agriculture 4.0 systems, fleets of digitised equipment employ current infrastructures like cloud computing to connect, identify the processing condition of different regions and the requirement for input materials and coordinate the machinery.

Civilization and the ABO blood groups

Background: Were humans who formed the first civilizations genetically different from other humans? Or did environmental factors alone result in settled ways of life and thus civilization? Hunter-gatherer ways of life appeared to be the norm until c 10,000 years ago when agriculture began to shape human destiny and civilization followed. As the first human gene discovered, ABO gene has been studied extensively as to health and personality correlates, and while no consensus has been reached, there are findings that warrant further research. Given the prominent variations in ABO blood group frequencies based on geography, some archeological evidence and current population data on ABO blood group frequencies could be valuable to understand the historical and genetic context of civilization. Methods: To explore possible genetic differences from hunter-gatherers in sites where early agricultural based civilizations formed, current populations in those areas were surveyed as to their ABO phenotypes. Results: Earliest civilizations seemed to be found in areas of lower ABO O:ABO A ratio compared to the world ratio. Conclusions: When looking at human migration patterns, the conclusion can be drawn that while the Out of Africa migrations of c 50,000 ya appeared to consist of groups with High ABO O:ABO A ratio, civilizations that formed after c 10,000 ya marking the Agricultural Revolution were of lower ABO O: ABO A ratio than that of c 50,000 years ago and even of current world ratio. It appears that a more genetically behaviorally diverse population supported the formation of earliest civilizations.