Search

Carbon nanomaterials (CNMs), comprising carbon dots, graphene‐related materials, and carbon nanotubes, have significant potential for enhancing agricultural productivity. Their compositional compatibility and exceptional properties intrigue a great deal of explorations in agricultural applications, such as fertilizers, pesticides, and regulators of plant growth. However, the evaluation of their agricultural applicability often lacks quantitative sustainability metrics, with insufficient scrutiny on the carbon footprint and scalability of the manufacturing. This review attempts to provide a quantitative ranking system for evaluating the manufacturing processes of the CNMs by applying the twelve principles of Green Chemistry, particularly in the context of agriculture applications. The review also offers a systematically organized account of CNMs' effects on plant systems, encompassing nutrient enhancement, photosynthesis, soil amelioration, disease resistance, and phytotoxicity, which can provide design rationales for the further development of CNMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines farmers' perceptions of agrochemical use in maize production and their harmful environmental effects. A convergent parallel mixed design was used to collect quantitative data from 254 respondents via structured interviews and qualitative data through in-depth interviews and Focus Group Discussions. The findings revealed that among those who were using agrochemicals, 98.9%, 59.2% and 49.7% used inorganic fertilizer to enhance soil fertility, pesticides to control pests and herbicides to kill weeds, respectively. Those who did not use agrochemicals were limited by many factors, including adverse effects of agrochemicals on the environment and lack of access to and the high cost of agrochemicals. Also, more than half of the respondents (51.2%) had limited knowledge about the harmful effects of agrochemicals on the environment. The perceived harmful effects of agrochemicals on the environment included being harmful to domestic animals and non-targeted insects and causing air pollution. The study provides insights for the government on how it could design and enforce educational programmes that would increase farmers' knowledge of the proper use of agrochemicals to protect the environment while maximizing maize production. This study contributes to the existing literature on how unawareness of farmers on the use of agrochemicals can adversely affect the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the food supply chain disruption from COVID-19 lockdowns around the world, we examine the predictive power of daily infectious diseases-related uncertainty (EMVID) on commodity traded futures within the agricultural bracket, sometimes known as the softs, using the heterogeneous autoregressive realised variance (HAR-RV) model. Considering the short-, medium-, and long-run recursive out-of-sample estimation approach, we estimate daily realised volatility by using intraday data within the 5 min interval for 15 agricultural commodity futures. During the COVID-19 episode, our results indicated that EMVID plays an important role in predicting the future path of agricultural commodity traded futures in the short, medium, and long run, i.e., h = 1, 5, and 22, respectively. According to the MSE-F test, these results are statistically significant. These results contain important implications for investors, portfolio managers, and speculators when faced with investment risk management and strategic asset allocation during infectious disease-related uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing global population has led the United Nations to predict that the world's population will increase from seven billion to eight billion by 2025 and 9.6 billion by 2050. This population growth has increased the need for food supply. Also, the 20% increase in annual food consumption in the last decade has exacerbated the problem of insufficient food production, leading to maximum utilization of crops, fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and genetic modification to increase agricultural food production. This approach has led to environmental problems, ecosystem pollution, and more importantly, food pollution and food insecurity, and endangering human health and the occurrence of various diseases, poisonings, and cancers. One of the most important sources of competitive advantage in this way is the capacity for innovation, which, despite its great importance, its success requires access to new knowledge. Given the costly and time-consuming creation of new knowledge by a single organization and that not all the knowledge needed for innovation and intelligent, innovative, and creative people in an organization, using an innovation network consisting of various actors related to food safety is a suitable and helpful solution to use a maximum of knowledge to create innovation in this field. This research uses a qualitative-quantitative research method, snowball sampling method, and in-depth interviews with experts and experts in organizations/companies related to agricultural food safety to identify the food safety innovation network and design a questionnaire from the qualitative stage collecting information. Drawing relationships between actors and examining network indicators using UCINET software. The findings of this study identified 21 organizations as actors in this network. Eight actors, including the Food and Drug Administration, Food Industry Group, etc., were the main and central actors, and 13 other actors, including the Food and Drug Administration, Quality Control Laboratory of the Food and Drug Administration, etc., were peripheral activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]