Tucked into the files of Iowa State University's Cooperative Extension Service is a small, innocuous looking pamphlet with the title Lenders: Working through the Farmer-Lender Crisis. Cooperative Extension Service intended this publication to improve bankers' empathy and communication skills, especially when facing farmers showing "Suicide Warning Signs." After all, they were working with individuals experiencing extreme economic distress, and each banker needed to learn to "be a good listener." What was important, too, was what was left unsaid. Iowa State published this pamphlet in April of 1986. Just four months earlier, farmer Dale Burr of Lone Tree, Iowa, had killed his wife, and then walked into the Hills Bank and Trust company and shot a banker to death in the lobby before taking shots at neighbors, killing one of them, and then killing himself. The unwritten subtext of this little pamphlet was "beware." If bankers failed to adapt to changing circumstances, the next desperate farmer might be shooting.This was Iowa in the 1980s. The state was at the epicenter of a nationwide agricultural collapse unmatched since the Great Depression. In When a Dream Dies, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg examines the lives of ordinary Iowa farmers during this period, as the Midwest experienced the worst of the crisis. While farms failed and banks foreclosed, rural and small-town Iowans watched and suffered, struggling to find effective ways to cope with the crisis. If families and communities were to endure, they would have to think about themselves, their farms, and their futures in new ways. For many Iowan families, this meant restructuring their lives or moving away from agriculture completely. This book helps to explain how this disaster changed children, families, communities, and the development of the nation's heartland in the late twentieth century. Agricultural crises are not just events that affect farms. When a Dream Dies explores the Farm Crisis of the 1980s from the perspective of the two-thirds of the state's agricultural population seriously affected by a farm debt crisis that rapidly spiraled out of their control. Riney-Kehrberg treats the Farm Crisis as a family event while examining the impact of the crisis on mental health and food insecurity and discussing the long-term implications of the crisis for the shape and function of agriculture.

The Chemical Dialogue Between Plants and Beneficial Microorganisms provides foundational insights on plant beneficial microorganisms and their impact on the health and productivity of plants. Providing in-depth and recent updates about unexplored aspects of plant microbes interactions, the book includes the biological repertoire of arbuscular mycorrhizal association, molecular architecture of Rhizobium-plant symbiosis, and endophytes in transcriptional plasticity during host colonization by endophytes. The book also includes details about the mechanism of different plant beneficial microorganisms, how these differ, and their cross signaling. This book will be an important reference for researchers working on different plant beneficial microorganisms and their molecular arsenal.

Kharif season crops of rainfed areas are inflicted by several important insect pests, diseases and weeds. Correct identification of insect pests, diseases and weeds is therefore necessary not only for strict quarantine to check the spread of new pest species, but to achieve the desired productivity levels. The purpose of this publication entitled "A Colour Handbook on Rainfed Kharif Crops: Protection, Constraints and Mitigation Strategies" is to assist the students, field researchers, scholars and farmers in correct identification of these pests and their management thereof. In this book, efforts have been made to describe the damaging symptoms, identification characteristics, and biology and management techniques of more than 100 pest species. Coloured illustrations have been provided in this book for amateurs.

The volume deals with other aspect (s) of metabolic activities of plants under abiotic stress. This book discusses techniques for improving yield potential and adaptiveness to unfavorable environmental conditions. This book also addresses how knowledge of the changes in physiological mechanisms can contribute in understanding the yield structure under abiotic stress. 1. Abiotic Stress and Metabolic Responses in Plants 2. Abiotic Stress and Secondary Metabolites in Plants 3. Microbes: Support and Protect Plants against Abiotic Stresses 4. Abiotic Stress and Physiological Traits in Plants 5. Abiotic Stress and Heat Shock Proteins (HSPs) in Plants

Exam Board: Pearson BTEC Academic Level: BTEC National Subject: Animal Management First teaching: September 2016 First Exams: Summer 2017 For all four of the externally assessed units 1, 2 and 3. Builds confidence with scaffolded practice questions. Unguided questions that allow students to test their own knowledge and skills in advance of assessment. Clear unit-by-unit correspondence between this Workbook and the Revision Guide and ActiveBook.

Education in agriculture is important as this sector caters not only to food security, but also human health. With a major focus on agriculture and to attract youth in agriculture, it is important that the education is made interesting, simple and purposeful. Textbooks are a medium of reaching out to the young minds who are in colleges and universities. The present attempt is a text book on the fundamentals of agriculture, entirely based on the syllabus for educating agricultural graduates and also based on the feedback from students. Chapter 1 describes the history and scope of agriculture, while chapter 2 covers classification of crops. Third chapter includes definitions of soil, soil composition, soil profile, soil development and different properties of soils, and the extent and distribution of the different soil classes of India is given in Chapter 4. The 5th Chapter is aboutclassification of Problem Soils and their distribution and reclamation method. Sixth chapter is on plant nutrition that includes all the functions and deficiency symptoms of plant nutrition and also the classification of nutrients. Fertilizers and manures, and its role in crop production have been dealt in Chapter 7.All aspects of irrigation and rainfed agriculture have been addressed in Chapters 8 and 9, respectively. The 10th Chapter is on Agricultural Engineering that includes implements, tillage, devices and power transmission in enhancement of agricultural productivity.

Nutrient use efficiency is a measure of how efficiently plants use the available mineral nutrients to produce economic produce. Improving nutrient use efficiency is very much essential under current scenario besides an understanding of the nutrient dynamics in soil-plant system."Enhancing nutrient use efficiency: Concepts, methods, and management interventions" is a comprehensive book which has a compilation of topics related to enhancement of nutrient use efficiency of various crops and cropping systems. Although it depends on the ability to plants to take up the nutrients from the soil, management practices have a key role to intervene the use efficiency. This book has 27 chapters written by eminent researchers in the field and addresses multifaceted approaches to enhance the nutrient use efficiency. Improving nutrient use efficiency is a prerequisite to reducing production costs in the wake of escalating cost of agricultural inputs in farming besides minimizing environmental contamination. Soil physical management is the foremost strategy to enhance the nutrient use efficiency. Hand held devices are popular among the farmers for nitrogen management in rice in several parts of the country, besides slow release nitrogenous fertilizers. Experiences from Long term fertilizer experiments and soil test crop response correlation are of immense use to understand the nutrient dynamics in soil and in turn designing practices for higher use efficiency. Besides describing the concepts and methods of nutrient use efficiency, management practices for dry land crops and cropping systems, cereal based cropping systems, rainfed pulses based cropping systems, soybean based cropping systems, sugarcane based cropping systems, cotton based cropping systems, tobacoo and oil seed based cropping systems, rapeseedmustard based cropping systems and spices based cropping systems are also dealt in this book and would serve as a resource guide for enhancing nutrient use efficiency in various crops and cropping systems

This book comprises 31 chapters on advances in soil-plant systems for improving nutrient use efficiency with four major themes viz. 1. Introduction and Fundamentals of Soil Plant Atmosphere Continuum and nutrient use efficiency 2. Soil physical, chemical, biological and agronomic management for improving NUE 3. Plant physiological, genetic & molecular biological basis for improving nutrient uptake & use efficiency 4. Climate change aspects related to soil and plant systems for improving NUE. Besides the book also include few chapters on analytical techniques and instrumentation for the study of nutrient use efficiency with respect to physico-chemical and biological parameters.