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Complete coverage on the establishment, maintenance, and management of natural turfgrass sports surfaces in Australia and overseas is provided. The book's 20 articles are divided into four sections covering: (1) the technical aspects of turfgrass growth and development; (2) business, administration, contract development and management; (3) the measurement of performance indicators in effectively managing different cultural systems such as lawn bowling greens, croquet lawns, lawn tennis courts, golf and resort courses, sport and athletic fields, cricket tables and wickets, and racecourses; and the (4) environmental issues facing the contemporary land manager, such as the use of scarce water resources, pesticide and fertilizer pollution, and the effects of golf course activities on people and wildlife. Topics also include how turfgrasses are identified and selected, how turfgrasses grow, how soils and drainage are significant and how grasses may be successfully established. Each article contains references . (GR)

This paper, one in a series of occasional publications, discusses trends in food production and population growth, emphasizing how environmental quality will be affected. The series is intended to increase understanding of the interrelationships between population growth and socioeconomic and cultural patterns throughout the world, and to communicate this understanding to scholars and policy makers. This publication includes a discussion of the following: (1) Land Resources and Productive Capacity; (2) Water Resources and Water Quality; (3) Energy and Food Production; (4) Fertilizers and Soil Nutrients; (5) Pest Management; (6) Organic Residues from Agriculture and Food Processing; (7) Threats to Ecological Stability; (8) Trade-Offs: Environmental Quality, Food Production, and Costs; and (9) The Role of Population Growth. (Author/RM)

Practical guidelines for turf management are provided that explain the natural processes involved, specific materials and equipment, and procedures that have been found to produce desirable results with a minimum of effort and expense. The handbook starts with information on how grasses grow, then proceeds through various chapters on turfgrass characteristics for cooler and warmer regions, soil characteristics, practical use of fertilizers, new turf care, weed and insect control, irrigation, procedures on renovating poor turf, and seasonal schedules for management of turf areas. (GR)

Nitrogen management in organic systems is challenging because complex organic forms of nitrogen originating from compost, manures, crop residue, and other organic materials must be converted by microbes into mineral forms of nitrogen to become plant-available. This overview and worksheet will help you estimate a nitrogen budget.

Chapter two of the book "The Complete Guide to Working With Worms: Using the Gardener's Best Friend for Organic Gardening and Composting," by Wendy M. Vincent is presented. It explains the process and benefits of worm composting in which nutrient-dense fertilizers are being produced through converting waste naturally into simple nutrients. It also cites the significant role of earthworm castings in neutralizing the soil and the disadvantages of commercial fertilizers.

The article discusses the soil and fertilization needs of houseplants. It emphasizes that quality potting soil is needed by houseplants as they cannot send their roots deep into the soil to get their water and food. It stresses that putting some additives, such as peat moss, composted plant materials, and sand, into the potting soil create ideal root-growing conditions for several household plants. It asserts that plants need nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium which are found in fertilizers.

The article discusses the factors to consider in choosing the right soil and amendments for growing healthy plants. It stresses that plenty of preparation is needed to ready some types of soil such as tilling and mixing for clay or dry soils. It asserts that a standard potting soil is needed for those plants that have specific soil requirements such as African violets. It emphasizes that for soil to meet the nutrients needed by plants, fertilizers and watering granules can be added to it.

The article offers information on the monocot flowering plant, bromeliad. It provides a detailed account on the light requirements of the plant, temperature and humidity, watering, soil and fertilizing, care and propagation, as well as common pests and diseases. In addition, the plant will not bloom until maturity, and it has a complete life cycle of about three to five years.

Chapter Three of the book "Food From the Sun: How Plants Live and Grow," Harriet Brown is presented. It explores the role of minerals such as nitrates, phosphorus, and potassium to plants in order to be healthy. It describes how plants get minerals from the soil through their roots to their stems and leaves. Also, it states the role of fertilizers for plants to obtain minerals.

Demand for fertilizer in developing countries has expanded at a rapid rate over the past forty years. The relative scarcity of agricultural land has been a major underlying cause of this expansion in demand. More proximate causes include the development of complementary Green Revolution technologies - high yielding, fertilizer responsive seed varieties and expansion of irrigation or better water control within irrigated systems. At the same time, real fertilizer prices have declined over time, driven by technical change in fertilizer production. Expansion of fertilizer consumption has been particularly high in many Asian countries, and particularly low in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, where infrastructural and institutional constraints have restricted use. Pesticide use has also expanded in developing countries, albeit in more localized circumstances. Relative scarcity of agricultural labor has been one cause of increased herbicide demand. Disease pressure and the availability of disease-resistant cultivars have influenced insecticide and fungicide demand. Integrated pest management (IPM), over the past 20 years, and genetically modified crops, over the past five to ten years, are new technologies that have the potential to curb the growth in pesticide use. Price policies, environmental policies, and related investments in agricultural research and development, infrastructural expansion, or education all influence the markets for fertilizer and other farm chemicals in developing countries. One major policy issue is how to reduce or eliminate fertilizer subsidies at the same time that measures are taken to increase demand in areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa where fertilizer use is below the social optimum. At the same time, in intensive agricultural systems where agricultural chemical use is high, resource degradation and human health risks from pesticide use compromise productivity growth. In areas of both high and low use of chemical inputs, meeting the production and environmental challenges of the future will require increasing reliance on knowledge-intensive technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phoenix Systems International, Inc. (PSII) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) worked together to completed the development of the Low Temperature Multi-Pollutant Control System (MPCS). PSII and NASA jointly developed a gas-phase oxidizer system that effectively (−100%) converts nitric oxide (NO), the primary NOx component from fossil-fuel combustion, to NO2. It was found that the NO oxidizer system also oxidizes elemental Mercury in the gas phase, which ultimately led to a system that captures >95 percent of the total Mercury emissions. Capture of SOx (primarily SO2) was necessary in order to efficiently oxidize NO to NO2. The capture efficiency for SOx is >99 percent and the capture efficiency for NOx is >98 percent. All of these tests were performed on a 3 MWe slip-stream from a coal-fired power plant located in South Carolina by an EPA Certified independent laboratory. The design of the Phoenix MPCS is highly efficient, but the process is simple and the system is easy to construct and maintain, which lowers the capital and operating costs. The consumables are commonly available, no expensive catalysts are needed, common mechanical system components are used, and operational components are well known. By-products of the process are components of commercial fertilizers, which may be sold for additional reduction of the operating costs. The projected average capital costs for the integrated SOx/NOx system is $275 per kW as compared with $365 per kW for a combined SCR/FGD system. The average Phoenix MPCS operating cost based on pilot unit data for SOx/NOx is $1, 175 per ton as compared with $1, 310 per ton for a combined SCR/FGD system. The values for the Phoenix MPCS do not include credit for fertilizer or other by-product sales and the Mercury removal capability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 1 of the book "Handbook of Precision Farming: Principles and Applications" is presented. Precision agriculture (PA) is defined as a holistic approach in which farmers can vary input use and cultivation techniques to be compatible to soil and crop conditions across a field. Examples of cultivation methods include the application of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and water, variety selection, planting, tillage and harvesting. The three critical elements to the success of PA are information, technology and management. The difference between PA and conventional farming is discussed.

The town of Bukoba has seen better days. Located on the shore of Lake Victoria in the northwestern corner of Tanzania, Bukoba has suffered from years of civil war in neighboring Uganda and Rwanda and from decades of neglect by the distant government in Dar es Salaam. Following German rule from 1889 to 1916 and a British mandate to 1961, this small town was exceptionally prosperous at independence, as were the Haya farmers in the surrounding countryside. Bukoba was the largest coffee-producing region in the country, and investments in trade and education seemed to auger well for the future. Fate has been unkind to Bukoba since 1961. Its coffee economy now supports a tedious status quo of just getting by, rather than a dream of sustained development. Farming is carried out on a small scale by many peasant families, and few have the resources to supply modest inputs that could make a difference to coffee output, such as pumps, fertilizers, and pesticides. This type of small-scale, undercapitalized, market-oriented agriculture is one of the principal legacies of colonialism in rural Africa. This chapter emphasizes the ability of Haya to make their voices heard and influence the way that coffee was integrated into their society. For all the tensions in the relationship between colonial state and peasants, there was an underlying consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our goal at the end of this enterprise is to propose bounded generalizations that are sensitive to variation and that avoid essentialized categories. Coffee was not an all-powerful master that demanded that its subjects follow a specific life-style and mindset. Our findings are often made in opposition to grand theories, such as dependency and modernization, and we are thus cautious about putting forward alternative models, especially at a time when comprehensive metanarratives are suspect. However, we also believe that we should not lapse into the nihilistic belief that every case is unique, every time different. We have to start with empirical work, based on realistic and historically sensitive categories. From these we can inductively create generalizations, which can allow us to attempt deductive reasoning. Despite our stress on variation and agency, we believe that useful conclusions can be drawn from all this, stimulating comparisons that look for patterns as well as for differences. Indeed, we hope that this volume might even help guide a minister of development in a contemporary coffee-producing country. He or she would consider consulting producers' associations, pickers' organizations, women's groups, ethnic clubs, processors, marketing boards, commercial intermediaries, internal transporters, exporters, and shippers, rather than dictate a “one-size-fits-all” policy from above. Such an enlightened minister would see that variation is determined not just by happenstance and contingency, and that local conditions and experiences affect the forces and consequences of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Brazil has had the world's most successful coffee economy since the middle of the nineteenth century. This chapter evaluates the impact of the coffee economy on the development process of Rio de Janeiro state. This analysis studies the effects of the expansion of coffee exports as the “staple” sector in the meaning of Watkins, Baldwin, and Hirschman linkage effects. Unlike in most other coffee countries, coffee exports in Brazil triggered a vigorous process of industrial development, first in the city and state of Rio de Janeiro then in a more pronounced fashion in the city and state of São Paulo. We are concerned with the reasons why coffee in Rio de Janeiro after the abolition of slavery in 1888 more closely resembled the development of other coffee economies than the spectacular (and unusual) income-multiplying effect it had in São Paulo. To fully understand Brazil's participation in the world coffee economy, one has to study regional and subregional diversity. Economic development could be seen as a diversification process of economic activities around an export-led productive basis; the leading products determine the dynamism of economic growth. This interpretation of export-led growth centers on the dynamism induced in the economy by incomes generated in the export sector. They stay in the capital circuit by their capacity to stimulate investments in their productive chain, both upstream and downstream, and on the income brought about by the expansion of exporting activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent scholarship on the history of coffee in Central America has explored the distribution over time and space of small family-based cultivation, particularly in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Beyond the question of documenting the at times surprisingly wide distribution of these small-scale production units, researchers have also sought to understand the processes by which peasant or family farms were consolidated or fragmented over time and the reasons for such varied outcomes. From one extreme of dramatic impoverishment and dependence of the minifundista/semi-proletarian, to the other extreme of wealthier smallholders who employed their impoverished fellow villagers, these treatments of coffee's social history have tended to focus on a wide range of issues. Among these, commercial and financial relations between producers and merchant/processors and the always polemical topic of labor recruitment and coercion have been particularly relevant. While no very broad agreement has yet been reached on a common nature of smallholding in Central America's coffee economy and its evolution over time, three general conclusions seem clear enough: first, some form of small holding survived, however impoverished and embattled, even in the more inhospitable contexts. While Williams no doubt provides the most copious evidence throughout the region, book-length works by McCreery for Guatemala and Lauria-Santiago for El Salvador and articles by Samper for El Salvador and by Charlip and Dore for Nicaragua have all made it clear that even in the cases long thought paradigmatic of estate-based coffee development, small holding has a complex and important history yet to be fully understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Coffee production on Réunion (Bourbon), a small island near Madagascar off the coast of Africa, was significant in the eighteenth century, but declined rapidly thereafter. Réunion Creoles then carried the coffee frontier to Madagascar, conquered by France in 1895. Colonial policies made coffee the major Malagasy export by the 1930s and, inadvertently, promoted indigenous smallholder production. The subsequent battle over resources between Réunion Creoles and their Malagasy competitors on the East Coast was a major cause of the 1947 uprising, one of the most bloody episodes in French colonial history. The revolt effectively squeezed small Creole planters out of coffee, leaving a handful of large metropolitan French concerns and numerous small indigenous cultivators. The 1972 revolution led to the demise of large French companies and ushered in a period of mismanaged nationalization that undermined the entire economy, including the coffee sector. Réunion, 1711–1895 Wild Mauritiana coffee was discovered, growing at an altitude of over 600 meters, near St. Paul on Réunion in 1711. Popularly termed “café marron,” it was said that “the most subtle connoisseurs can in no way distinguish [it] … from Mocha coffee.” From 1720, English and Dutch ships purchased Mauritiana coffee, and it was well received in France in 1721. However, Mauritiana prospered only at high altitude and was pronounced less smooth, less perfumed, and more bitter than Mocha, favored by the French East India Company, which governed Réunion from 1708 to 1758. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Java began exporting coffee in the early eighteenth century, under the aegis of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which introduced coffee to the lucrative European market. Coffee cultivation had a checkered career until the 1830s, when it became part of the system of state control of peasant agriculture known as the Cultivation System (Kultuur Stelsel). For well over half a century after 1830, Java produced a substantial portion of the coffee imported by Europe. On the eve of the outbreak of leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix) in the early 1880s, which ravaged Java's coffee groves, the island exported nearly 82 percent of all coffee leaving the Dutch East Indies, which amounted to 18 percent of world coffee exports. Thereafter, Java's coffee cultivation declined rapidly. Nevertheless, as forced coffee growing had been the bedrock of colonial revenue in its heyday, the Dutch colonial government was understandably reluctant to abolish its monopoly of coffee production and export. By 1917, when the final remains of the monopoly were wound up, the Dutch East Indies produced a mere 5 percent of world production, and accounted for only 2 percent of world exports. We know little about the impact of coffee cultivation on Java's peasantry in comparison with sugar, the other major commercial crop of the Cultivation System, which profoundly affected every aspect of the economic life of indigenous people. The colonial government left almost all aspects of coffee production in the hands of peasants, despite some efforts at modernization in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of New World coffee producers in the late nineteenth century has spawned a large body of writings, whereas stagnation and decline in Asia and Africa have attracted few scholars. Statistics for the early nineteenth century are rare and unreliable, but they suggest that Asia and Africa's share of global coffee exports amounted to around a third in the 1830s. This proportion remained roughly the same in the 1860s and 1870s. However, it then rapidly dwindled to around a twentieth by 1913. Within this broad evolution, there was an additional contrast. Asia was subject to a particularly sharp fall, whereas Africa's small share of the world market remained fairly constant in relative terms. When the focus is further narrowed to particular countries or regions within large and diverse countries such as Indonesia and India, outcomes were even more diverse. This chapter explores both the reasons for the overall downward trend in Africa and Asia's share of world coffee exports and the causes of the extraordinarily uneven nature of that decline. The evolution of world production took place against a background of increasing volatility in the real price of coffee. The world price rose fairly steadily from the late 1840s to reach a peak in the first half of the 1870s, making coffee the “wonder crop” of tropical farmers around the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coffee commodity chains serve as a bidirectional link between producers and consumers worldwide, and they also interconnect local processes and those taking place in overseas markets. Historically, there has been an extraordinary diversity in the ways in which cultivation, harvesting, transport, processing, and export of coffee have been organized. Consumption patterns and especially consumer preferences have changed over time in ways that need to be taken into account but whose effect on coffee producers throughout the tropical world varies considerably in accordance with local situations and dynamics. Coffee farmers' responses to changing external conditions have been far from uniform, and cannot be explained merely as passive reflections of world market trends and fluctuations. This chapter uses the development of Costa Rican coffee production and commercialization, together with brief references to other cases, as a starting point for comparative discussion of interactions between local agroecological, economic, and social conditions, on the one hand, and changes in the international market for this product, on the other. Special attention is paid to the process by which producers of a given country – in this case Costa Rica – come to produce coffee with certain specific attributes that consumers abroad appreciate and for which they are willing to pay. The Costa Rican coffee commodity chain is compared, in passing, to other ones where “high-quality” coffee is produced and subsequently traded under various arrangements, but with substantial – though, of course, variable – smallholder participation at least in cultivation and sometimes in processing and/or transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding the scope of commercial agriculture was integral to state formation in the postcolonial period, for “development” could extend the reach of the state and strengthen a regime's grip on new regions (and new producers). In the best of circumstances it also helped fill state coffers with export and tax revenues. Viewing postcolonial development through statist lenses, it is easy to miss how political – and how constrained – African rulers' choices really were about where, when, and how to promote structural transformation in rural social relations and modes of production. Rulers were constrained by their rural allies' demands and refusals, by fears of the political consequences of rural socioeconomic change, and by possibilities and limits to change inherent in indigenous modes of agricultural production. The endogenous theory of institutional choice focuses attention on these geopolitical factors. In so doing it helps measure the considerable extent to which institutional and market structures of African economies have been shaped by the rural societies that central rulers have sought to tax and govern. Leaders who now seek to defy or willfully transform these constaints continue to do so at considerable political risk and cost. This chapter focuses on two regions that were economically peripheral at the time of independence: the Senegal River Valley, which divides Senegal and Mauritania (and thus constitutes Senegal's northern border region), and the Korhogo region, which is the center of gravity of Côte d'Ivoire's northern half. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southern Côte d'Ivoire and southwestern Ghana lie in a tropical rainforest zone, separated only by a boundary drawn by Europeans in the nineteenth century. Major rivers cross these regions on their way to the Atlantic – the Comoé, the Banadama, the Sassandra, and the Volta. In Côte d'Ivoire, an extensive lagoon system shelters much of the coast from the sea. The terrain is mostly flat, except in the far-western parts of Côte d'Ivoire that border Guinée, and the air is humid. In Ghana, a long coastline of white beaches is dotted with decaying castles and forts that remain from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Coastal lowlands give way to the gentle slopes and hills of the Asante uplands, which mark the northern limit of the forest zone in these parts. Since about the 1940s and 1950s, farmers in this broad, forested swath of West Africa have been the world's leading producers of cocoa. Southern Côte d'Ivoire is also one of the largest producers of coffee. Postcolonial rulers in these two regions faced the challenge of governing and taxing export-producing peasantries that have been among the most prosperous in modern Africa. This chapter explains why they chose such different strategies to do so. At the household level, the dynamics of export-crop production in the two regions is similar. And in both zones, the cash crop economy emerged from grassroots dynamics of innovation that involved little direct state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions that project state power into rural Africa distribute political and administrative authority between central and local elites. This chapter traces this institutional topography in Senegal and reveals a political landscape marked by striking geographic variation. This variation has virtually no basis in legal text and goes largely unnoticed in studies that generalize from findings from the groundnut basin, Senegal's export-producing core. The unevenness is an artifact of the periphery's ability to shape the choices of institution builders at the center. A conventional wisdom holds that postcolonial African states are so centralized and bureaucratic, and African rulers so heavy handed in their dealings with the countryside, that significant regional variations in state structure and process have not been allowed to develop. Postcolonial Senegal is often depicted in these terms. It is often presented as the archetype of the overcentralized, bureaucratic state. In Wunch and Owolu's Failure of the Centralized State (1990), the Senegalese government is described as driven by a passion for territorial administrative uniformity and top-down control. These excesses are said to reflect the modernizing instincts of the nationalist elite, the heavy imprint of French administrative law and tradition, and the legacies of French direct rule. Centralizing impulses have indeed been ever present, and accounts that stress this must be taken seriously in an African country with a history of administrative continuity and political stability as long as Senegal's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on two distinct forms of organic waste that can cause agricultural pollution. These are agricultural and non-agricultural organic wastes. They contain a range of materials including carbohydrates, fats, proteins, nitrates, phosphates and ammonia, as well as potentially being subject to contamination by pesticides, oils, veterinary products, trace metals and pathogens. Although organic wastes are a valuable alternative to artificial inorganic fertilizers, some farmers have relatively little perception of their nutrient value and consequently may manage them inefficiently, although many claim to make allowances for the nutrients supplied in manures in fertilizer plans. The polluting effects of organic wastes can occur in a number of ways and therefore require a broad range of approaches to control. The pollution problems are principally point source; the threat of the diffuse pollution of ground and surface waters by N and P from organic wastes. The article further describes the nature and causes of pollution by agricultural and non-agricultural organic wastes on farms, and introduces some practical solutions to minimize environmental risks.

Chapter 4 of the book "Traditional American Farming Techniques: A Ready Reference on All Phases of Agriculture for Farmers of the United States and Canada," by Frank D. Gardner is presented. The chapter focuses on the use of commercial fertilizers in the U.S., the different forms of fertilizer materials, and the methods of applications. Farmers are expected to know the deficiency of the soil on his farm prior to using fertilizers. It also discusses the principles governing the profitable use of fertilizers.