Recognition of Leaf Disease Using Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network by Applying Feature Reduction

Agriculture is crucial to the economic prosperity and development of India. Plant diseases can have a devastating influence towards food safety and a considerable loss in the production of agricultural products. Disease identification on the plant is essential for long-term agriculture sustainability. Manually monitoring plant diseases is difficult due to time limitations and the diversity of diseases. In the realm of agricultural inputs, automatic characterization of plant diseases is widely required. Based on performance out of all image-processing methods, is better suited for solving this task. This work investigates plant diseases in grapevines. Leaf blight, Black rot, stable, and Black measles are the four types of diseases found in grape plants. Several earlier research proposals using machine learning algorithms were created to detect one or two diseases in grape plant leaves; no one offers a complete detection of all four diseases. The photos are taken from the plant village dataset in order to use transfer learning to retrain the EfficientNet B7 deep architecture. Following the transfer learning, the collected features are down-sampled using a Logistic Regression technique. Finally, the most discriminant traits are identified with the highest constant accuracy of 98.7% using state-of-the-art classifiers after 92 epochs. Based on the simulation findings, an appropriate classifier for this application is also suggested. The proposed technique’s effectiveness is confirmed by a fair comparison to existing procedures.

СТАЛИЙ РОЗВИТОК СІЛЬСЬКОГО ГОСПОДАРСТВА ТА ЙОГО ВПЛИВ НА ПРОДОВОЛЬЧУ БЕЗПЕКУ УКРАЇНИ

The article attempts to explore the agriculture sustainability issues and its implications for food security in Ukraine. The study discusses a critical importance of agribusiness development for Ukraine's economy. However, it is observed that currently, this sector is facing a serious decline in production. A special emphasis is put that agriculture affects the national food security. In this context, the purpose of this study is to identify negative factors and offer pathways to enhance the agricultural sector productivity. To attain the research objectives, the empirical and theoretical scientific approaches as well as the research methods of observation, analysis and synthesis have been employed. This study also presents a ‘sustainable development’ concept interpretation along with revealing its core structural elements that characterize the contemporary state of agriculture from the three perspectives: economic, social and environmental. Accordingly, insights into each of these three aspects were provided that allowed to evaluate the agricultural performance, to assess a salary range in the industry as well as to examine soil fertility. The research findings have detected some negative trends in the agricultural sector development. In particular, the economic aspect perspective has demonstrated a yield decline and a reduction in livestock as well as a drop in labor productivity in agribusinesses. As it is reported, the social settings are characterized by large fluctuations in the payroll budgets in agricultural enterprises and the shortage in certain food products consumed by Ukrainians against physiologically justified norms of consumption of these products. The environmental aspect shows a decrease in the application of organic and mineral fertilizers which negatively affects the soil fertility. Given the above research outcomes, this study offers an action plan to promote sustainable development, boost productivity and enhance the agricultural industry efficiency.

Sustainability

The oil palm (Elaies guineensis Jacq) is the largest produced and highly traded vegetable oil globally yet has the lowest cost of production and significantly higher productivity compared to other oil crops. The crop has the potential of alleviating poverty for smallholders and lifting the economies of countries with large scale production notably, Malaysia and Indonesia and currently on high demand for use as biofuel feedstock. Irrespective of these advantages of the oil palm, there is a global concern on the devastating impact of the crop on the environment and ecosystem during plantation developments and expansions. Deforestation, biodiversity loss, water and air pollution and toxic compounds from palm oil mill effluents (POME) are some of the negative impacts of the oil palm. For the industry to be more beneficial and impactful globally, sustainability strategies becomes urgent need. Sustainability strategies such as increasing the yield of oil palm, precision agriculture, sustainability certification, support for smallholders and circular economy have been put across to curtail the negative impacts of oil palm expansion.

Mitigation of nitrous oxide emissions from an acidic soil by valorization of industrial waste

<p>Increasing evidence suggests that alkaline mineral amendments from industrial wastes (e.g., phosphorus tailing, PT) have potential to ameliorate soil acidification and improve agriculture sustainability. However, the effects of such amendment on nitrous oxide (N<sub>2</sub>O) production remain elusive. To fill this knowledge gap, an incubation experiments were conducted with an acidic soil of pH 4.80 treated with i) control (CK, no amendments), ii) urea at 60 mg N kg<sup>-1</sup> (U), iii) 10 g kg<sup>-1</sup> amendments (S) and iv) 10 g kg<sup>-1</sup> amendments plus urea at 60 mg N kg<sup>-1</sup> (S+U). A 184-h experiment was conducted with a robotized incubation system for monitoring real-time gases (O<sub>2</sub>, N<sub>2</sub>O, N<sub>2</sub>, CO<sub>2</sub>) dynamics. Results from this batch experiment showed that the soil pH was significantly increased with the amendment addition (S and S+U) from 4.80 to above 6.00. Meanwhile, the mineralization, nitrification and denitrification processes were stimulated with the amendment addition. The N<sub>2</sub>O production was reduced by an average of 65.7% with the amendment addition compared to that without the amendment application. After incubation, higher N<sub>2 </sub>productions were observed from the soil with amendment addition (S and S+U) than untreated soil (<em>P</em><0.05). The findings suggest that the N<sub>2</sub>O emissions from acidic soils can be considerably controlled by valorization of PT.</p>

Towards Sustainable Agriculture in Chile, Reflections on the Role of Public Policy

Given the increasing demand for agricultural products and the environmental degradation that current agricultural practices generate, there is an urgent need to change the activity. Sustainable agriculture emerges as an attractive alternative to mitigate the adverse effects of the activity on the environment, increase its resilience to global change, and increase the current population’s quality of life without sacrificing that of future generations. However, identifying effective policies that can achieve these goals remains elusive. In Chile, this sector has been one of the drivers of growth and poverty reduction but still faces many environmental and social challenges, and there is a growing public demand for achieving sustainability from an economic, environmental, and social perspective. Public and private institutions have made relevant efforts to increase Chilean agriculture sustainability. However, the need to transition towards sustainable agriculture is still not recognized by all stakeholders. In this article, we review current challenges and policies to achieve a more sustainable agriculture in Chile.

Francisco J Lacueva - Towards Improving Agriculture Sustainability through Multifactorial Machine Learning

Póster presentado en la IX Jornada de Jóvenes Investigadores del I3A

Amino Acid and Carbohydrate Metabolism Are Coordinated to Maintain Energetic Balance during Drought in Sugarcane

The ability to expand crop plantations without irrigation is a major goal to increase agriculture sustainability. To achieve this end, we need to understand the mechanisms that govern plant growth responses under drought conditions. In this study, we combined physiological, transcriptomic, and genomic data to provide a comprehensive picture of drought and recovery responses in the leaves and roots of sugarcane. Transcriptomic profiling using oligoarrays and RNA-seq identified 2898 (out of 21,902) and 46,062 (out of 373,869) transcripts as differentially expressed, respectively. Co-expression analysis revealed modules enriched in photosynthesis, small molecule metabolism, alpha-amino acid metabolism, trehalose biosynthesis, serine family amino acid metabolism, and carbohydrate transport. Together, our findings reveal that carbohydrate metabolism is coordinated with the degradation of amino acids to provide carbon skeletons to the tricarboxylic acid cycle. This coordination may help to maintain energetic balance during drought stress adaptation, facilitating recovery after the stress is alleviated. Our results shed light on candidate regulatory elements and pave the way to biotechnology strategies towards the development of drought-tolerant sugarcane plants.

Corn Agronomic Attributes in Succession of Leguminous Cover Crops and Nitrogen Doses

This study aimed to determine the dry biomass and nitrogen accumulation, the height and stem diameter of corn crop preceded by different leguminous cover crops, under different nitrogen doses. The study was conducted in the experimental area of Federal Technology University of Paraná, in Dois Vizinhos. The eigth cover crops consisted on: Sunn hemp; Crotalaria spectabilis; Jackbean; Cajanus cajan; Dolichos lablab; Velvet beans; Black velvet beans and Spontaneous species. The two dose nitrogen fertilization included: zero kg N ha-1; 180 kg N ha-1 applied in a single dose, under conditions of adequate humidity, 47 days after corn seeding. Were evaluated the height, dry biomass and basal stem diameter corn and the decomposition and release of N from the cover plants. The use of leguminous before corn crop is a good option for the southwest region of Paraná because it promotes soil protection and can promote increased carbon stock in the environment. The leguminous cover crop should be used like green manure, making them important species in the Brazilian agriculture sustainability context, once there are evidence of reducing or even not using mineral nitrogen fertilization in the subsequent agricultural crops, mainly the Jackbean.