Readings and lectures
A branch of agriculture dealing with field-crop production and soil management?
What is agronomy?
The transformation of a non‑arid landscape to an arid landscape, usually through a combination of climate changes and human‑induced soil degradation.
What is desertification?
A production and marketing model whereby consumers buy shares of a farm’s harvest in advance
What is community supported agriculture (CSA)?
Three general components that determine profitability of a crop harvested from a field?
What are 1) yield, 2) crop market value, and 3) production costs?
Example of a pulse crop
What are lentils, chickpea, dry beans, and peas?
Plants that are not harvested bu rather seeded and grown to provide benefits
What are cover crops?
Two ways to build soil organic matter
What are 1) reduce losses and 2) increase additions?
Components of the disease triangle
What are pathogen, environment, and host?
The difference between crop yields observed at any given location and the crop’s potential yield at the same location given current agricultural practices and technologies.
What is a yield gap?
Approach to conserving biodiversity that uses intensive agriculture to produce more food on less land so that some could be set aside to conserve biodiversity
What is land sparing?
Amount of food that is never consumed.
What is 1/3?
Tool used to completely invert soil. Effective at killing weeds, incorporating amendments, and preparing seedbeds prior to planting crops. Also can degrade soil health and requires relatively large amounts of fuel and labor.
What is a moldboard plow?
The tendency to interpret new evidence as
confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.
What is confirmation bias?
System where two or more crops are grown
simultaneously on the same field
Origin (name and year) of the definition of sustainable agriculture.
What is the Brundtland Report ‘Our Common Future’ 1987, which was commissioned by United Nations?
Difficult but important problems set by various institutions or professions to encourage solutions or advocate for the application of government or philanthropic funds.
What are Grand Challenges?
Reason(s) why healthy soil has sufficient but not excess supply of nutrients?
What are 1) avoid excess weed growth, 2) reduce risk of environmental pollution, 3) prevent unhealthy crop growth (excess vegetative growth, susceptiability to insect pests and disease, etc.)?
Aquifer in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska that has been severely depleted over the past century.
What is the Ogallala aquifer?
Name for leaving a cropland either uncropped, weed-free or with volunteer vegetation for at least one growing season in order to control weeds, accumulate
and store water, regenerate available plant nutrients, and restore soil productivity.
What is fallow (fallowing)?
The current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.
What is the Anthropocene?
Using less intensive farming methods that conserve biodiversity within agricultural fields
What is Land sharing?
Person who developed “Law of the Minimum” in 1828
Who is Carl Sprengel and Justus von Liebig?
Percentage of food crops that are lost annually to pests
What is 40%?
-FAO (lecture on Pest Management by Dr. Menalled)
The practice of tilling, planting, and performing all cultural operations in a parallel direction to the field slope
What is contour farming?
Field experiment at Rothamsted that was started in 1843 by John Bennet Lawes and Joseph Henry Gilbert that compared the effects of fertilizer and manure on wheat yield.
What is the Broadbalk Experiment?