Agriculture Commons^™

Essays On Malawian Agriculture: Micro-Level Welfare Impacts Of Agricultural Productivity; Profitability Of Fertilizer Use; And Targeting Of Fertilizer Subsidy Programs, Francis Addeah Darko

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation comprises of three essays that address different aspects of agriculture in Malawi using a two-wave panel data collected by the National Statistical Office of Malawi with support from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) program. Each essay stands alone as an independent study because of differences in research questions and the methodologies used in addressing the questions.

The first essay analyzes the micro-level welfare impacts of agricultural productivity. Welfare is measured by various dimensions of poverty and food insecurity; and agricultural productivity is measured by maize yield and value of crop …

Evaluating The Two-Stage Ditch As A New Best Management Practice, Andi Hodaj

Open Access Dissertations

A two-stage ditch involves modifications of a traditional drainage ditch to resemble more the features of a natural stream. The idea is to create or simulate extended benches on both sides of the ditch that would develop naturally over a period of time in a stream because of geomorphological processes. Previous research in Indiana and Ohio has shown that two-stage ditches offer the potential to reduce sediment load and extend the interaction time between water and vegetation on the benches allowing larger uptake of nutrients from the vegetation on the extended benches, and increasing the denitrification rates in the bench …

Crop Modeling For Assessing And Mitigating The Impacts Of Extreme Climatic Events On The Us Agriculture System, Zhenong Jin

Open Access Dissertations

The US agriculture system is the world’s largest producer of maize and soybean, and typically supplies more than one-third of their global trading. Nearly 90% of the US maize and soybean production is rainfed, thus is susceptible to climate change stressors such as heat waves and droughts. Process-based crop and cropping system models are important tools for climate change impact assessments and risk management. As data- science is becoming a new frontier for agriculture growth, the incoming decade calls for operational platforms that use hyper-local growth monitoring, high-resolution real-time weather and satellite data assimilation and cropping system modeling to help …