agricultural revolution
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2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kasper Johansen ◽  
Matteo G. Ziliani ◽  
Rasmus Houborg ◽  
Trenton E. Franz ◽  
Matthew F. McCabe

Abstract 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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 29-48
Author(s):  
Cayetana Heidi Johnson

The Old Testament is clearly a mixture of myths and real historical figures with their events. There is no question about the contribution of mythology, since much of Genesis has been formed from common mythological accounts from all over the ancient Near East. The stories of Creation, the primordial couple, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Great Flood, and much more, are a commonplace of narratives throughout the region. Although these accounts are mythological, it does not mean that they have not been shaped by real events. Specialists speculate about a great flood that took place in the Near East as a result of rising water levels at the end of the last Ice Age (around 5000 BC). This coincided at a time when the Agricultural Revolution had taken over the Fertile Crescent and Egypt. Various peoples of the Levant adopted mythological narratives and reformulated them to create their own unique and original tales. Some of the main figures of the Bible, such as Adam and Eve, Noah, Lot, finally the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) were their own compositions but, as can be seen with the patriarch Abraham, who was not an exclusive figure of the Hebrew people, his conversion to monotheism is, however, something peculiar to the spiritual creativity of the Jews. Here as in the composition of the New Testament, archeology is the necessary aid to locate the reality and the truth of sacred history and its development in human time.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Brassley ◽  
David Harvey ◽  
Matt Lobley ◽  
Michael Winter

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ze-Hui Chen ◽  
Ya-Xi Xu ◽  
Xing-Long Xie ◽  
Dong-Feng Wang ◽  
Diana Aguilar-Gómez ◽  
...  

AbstractThe domestication and subsequent development of sheep are crucial events in the history of human civilization and the agricultural revolution. However, the impact of interspecific introgression on the genomic regions under domestication and subsequent selection remains unclear. Here, we analyze the whole genomes of domestic sheep and their wild relative species. We found introgression from wild sheep such as the snow sheep and its American relatives (bighorn and thinhorn sheep) into urial, Asiatic and European mouflons. We observed independent events of adaptive introgression from wild sheep into the Asiatic and European mouflons, as well as shared introgressed regions from both snow sheep and argali into Asiatic mouflon before or during the domestication process. We revealed European mouflons might arise through hybridization events between a now extinct sheep in Europe and feral domesticated sheep around 6000–5000 years BP. We also unveiled later introgressions from wild sheep to their sympatric domestic sheep after domestication. Several of the introgression events contain loci with candidate domestication genes (e.g., PAPPA2, NR6A1, SH3GL3, RFX3 and CAMK4), associated with morphological, immune, reproduction or production traits (wool/meat/milk). We also detected introgression events that introduced genes related to nervous response (NEURL1), neurogenesis (PRUNE2), hearing ability (USH2A), and placental viability (PAG11 and PAG3) into domestic sheep and their ancestral wild species from other wild species.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip A. Loring ◽  
Palash Sanyal

Global food systems have increased in complexity significantly since the mid-twentieth century, through such innovations as mechanization, irrigation, genetic modification, and the globalization of supply chains. While complexification can be an effective problem-solving strategy, over-complexification can cause environmental degradation and lead systems to become increasingly dependent on external subsidies and vulnerable to collapse. Here, we explore a wide array of evidence of complexification and over-complexification in contemporary global food systems, drawing on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and elsewhere. We find that food systems in developed, emerging, and least developed countries have all followed a trajectory of complexification, but that return on investments for energy and other food system inputs have significantly declined—a key indicator of over-complexification. Food systems in developed countries are further along in the process of over-complexification than least developed and emerging countries. Recent agricultural developments, specifically the introduction of genetically modified crops, have not altered this trend or improved return on investments for inputs into food systems. Similarly, emerging innovations belonging to the “digital agricultural revolution” are likewise accompanied by energy demands that may further exacerbate over-complexification. To reverse over-complexification, we discuss strategies including innovation by subtraction, agroecology, and disruptive technology.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (22) ◽  
pp. 7475
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Peppes ◽  
Emmanouil Daskalakis ◽  
Theodoros Alexakis ◽  
Evgenia Adamopoulou ◽  
Konstantinos Demestichas

The upcoming agricultural revolution, known as Agriculture 4.0, integrates cutting-edge Information and Communication Technologies in existing operations. Various cyber threats related to the aforementioned integration have attracted increasing interest from security researchers. Network traffic analysis and classification based on Machine Learning (ML) methodologies can play a vital role in tackling such threats. Towards this direction, this research work presents and evaluates different ML classifiers for network traffic classification, i.e., K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Classification (SVC), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF) and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), as well as a hard voting and a soft voting ensemble model of these classifiers. In the context of this research work, three variations of the NSL-KDD dataset were utilized, i.e., initial dataset, undersampled dataset and oversampled dataset. The performance of the individual ML algorithms was evaluated in all three dataset variations and was compared to the performance of the voting ensemble methods. In most cases, both the hard and the soft voting models were found to perform better in terms of accuracy compared to the individual models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 12345
Author(s):  
Sarah Hackfort

Digitalization of agriculture is often hailed as the next agricultural revolution. However, little is yet known about its social impacts and power effects. This review addresses this research gap by analyzing patterns of inequality linked to the development and adoption of digital technologies in agriculture and reviewing the strategies developed to reduce these inequalities and challenge the power relations in which they are embedded. Analysis of 84 publications found through a systematic literature review identified five patterns of inequality: (1) in digital technology development; (2) in the distribution of benefits from the use of digital technologies; (3) in sovereignty over data, hardware and digital infrastructure; (4) in skills and knowledge (‘digital literacy’); and (5) in problem definition and problem-solving capacities. This review also highlights the existence of emancipatory initiatives that are applying digital technologies to challenge existing inequalities and to advance alternative visions of agriculture. These initiatives underscore the political nature of digital agriculture; however, their reach is still quite limited. This is partly due to the fact that existing inequalities are structural and represent expressions of corporate power. From such a perspective, digitalization in agriculture is not a ‘revolution’ per se; rather, digital technologies mirror and reproduce existing power relations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (47) ◽  
pp. e2113598118
Author(s):  
Mattia Fochesato ◽  
Charles Higham ◽  
Amy Bogaard ◽  
Cristina Cobo Castillo

When the first rice farmers expanded into Southeast Asia from the north about 4,000 y ago, they interacted with hunter-gatherer communities with an ancestry in the region of at least 50 millennia. Rigorously dated prehistoric sites in the upper Mun Valley of Northeast Thailand have revealed a 12-phase sequence beginning with the first farmers followed by the adoption of bronze and then iron metallurgy leading on to the rise of early states. On the basis of the burial rituals involving interment with a wide range of mortuary offerings and associated practices, we identify, by computing the values of the Gini coefficient, at least two periods of intensified social inequality. The first occurred during the initial Bronze Age that, we suggest, reflected restricted elite ownership of exotic valuables within an exchange choke point. The second occurred during the later Iron Age when increased aridity stimulated an agricultural revolution that rapidly led to the first state societies in mainland Southeast Asia.


Agriculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1066
Author(s):  
Robert Newell ◽  
Lenore Newman ◽  
Zsofia Mendly-Zambo

The fourth agricultural revolution has resulted in technologies that could significantly support global efforts toward food security and environmental sustainability. A potential means for accelerating the development of these technologies is through business accelerator and incubator (BAI) programs. Using Canada as a case study, this study examines considerations around building agritech BAI capacity for supporting transitions to sustainable, resilient food systems. The research employs expert stakeholder interview and thematic coding methodology to identify opportunities, success factors, challenges/barriers, and actions/approaches for increasing agritech BAIs in a region/country. The study also identifies findings that are broadly applicable to BAIs in general and those that are specific to sectoral (i.e., agritech) and place-specific (i.e., Canada) contexts. The analysis identified four opportunities themes, seven success factors themes, eight challenges/barriers themes, and eight actions/approaches themes. Of the four thematic areas, success factors were the most broadly applicable to different sectoral and place contexts, and challenges/barriers were most specific to the agritech and (to a lesser degree) Canadian contexts. The study elucidates roles, challenges, and ways forward for building agritech BAI capacity in regions and countries for harnessing the opportunities presented by the fourth agricultural revolution and transitioning to sustainable and resilient food systems.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (10) ◽  
pp. e0258206
Author(s):  
Michael Kempf

The Carpathian Basin represents the cradle of human agricultural development during the Neolithic period, when large parts were transformed into ‘cultural landscapes’ by first farmers from the Balkans. It is assumed that an Early Neolithic subsistence economy established along the hydrologic systems and on Chernozem soil patches, which developed from loess deposits. However, recent results from soil chemistry and geoarchaeological analyses raised the hypothesis that extensive Chernozem coverage developed from increased land-use activity and that Early Neolithic ‘cultural’ groups were not restricted to loess-covered surfaces but rather preferred hydromorphic soils that formed in the floodplains. This article performs multivariable statistics from large datasets of Neolithic sites in Hungary and allows tracing Early to Late Neolithic site preferences from digital environmental data. Quantitative analyses reveal a strong preference for hydromorphic soils, a significant avoidance of loess-covered areas, and no preference for Chernozem soils throughout the Early Neolithic followed by a strong transformation of site preferences during the Late Neolithic period. These results align with socio-cultural developments, large-scale mobility patterns, and land-use and surface transformation, which shaped the Carpathian Basin and paved the way for the agricultural revolution across Europe.


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