Adoption of recently introduced herbicide tolerant soybean varieties has been extremely rapid. By 1998, approximately 38% of the total US soybean acreage was planted to varieties developed through the use of biotechnology methods to be tolerant to various herbicides. The first herbicide tolerant varieties, sulfonylurea tolerant soybeans, were introduced in 1993 and were developed to tolerate higher rates
...ISO 9000 certification benefits, reality or myth?
Since 1987, when the International Organisation for Standardisation first published the ISO 9000 series of quality standards, the world-wide take up of quality certification to the ISO 9000 standard (QCert) has been increasing rapidly. At the end of 1998, more than 270,000 firms in over 143 countries, will be certified to the standard, an increase of 48,000 on the previous year (ISO, 1999). The
...Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices
A doubling in global food demand projected for the next 50 years poses huge challenges for the sustainability both of food production and of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and the services they provide to society. Agriculturalists are the principal managers of global useable lands and will shape, perhaps irreversibly, the surface of the Earth in the coming decades. New incentives and policies for
...A calcium influx is triggered and propagates in the zygote as a wavefront during in vitro fertilization of flowering plants
In this paper, we report direct measurement of an influx of extracellular Ca2+ induced by gamete fusion in flowering plants. This result was obtained during maize in vitro fertilization with the use of an extracellular Ca2+
...Extending Storage Life of Fresh-Cut Apples Using Natural Products and Their Derivatives
Fresh-cut or minimally processed refrigerated fruit has become an important area of potential growth in the rapidly expanding fresh-cut produce industry (Luo and Barbosa-Canovas, 1996). However, deterioration of the fruit after minimal processing resulting from woundinduced biochemical and physiological changes associated with water loss, respiration, and cut-surface browning has been accompanied by
...Agricultural Biotechnology: Benefits, Opportunities, and Leadership
Writing exactly 130 years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson acknowledged in A Plea for Gas Lamps that "Cities given, the problem was to light them." The he proceeded with his indictment of electricity saying the "urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or along the corridors
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