Effects of social capital and technology cognition on farmers' adoption of soil and water conservation tillage technology in the Loess Plateau of China.

From the aspect of regional differences, this paper investigated the impact of social capital and technology cognition on the adoption of soil and water conservation tillage technology in the Loess Plateau in China. We find social networks and social trust had significant impact on the adoption of contour tillage technology by farmers in Shanxi and Shaanxi. Social participation had a significant impact in Shaanxi, whereas social prestige had a significant impact in Gansu, and social norms had a significant impact on the adoption of contour tillage technology in the three provinces.

Genome-Wide Association Studies for Dynamic Plant Height and Number of Nodes on the Main Stem in Summer Sowing Soybeans.

Plant height (PH) and the number of nodes on the main stem (NN) serve as major plant architecture traits affecting soybean seed yield. Although many quantitative trait loci for the two traits have been reported, their genetic controls at different developmental stages in soybeans remain unclear. Here, 368 soybean breeding lines were genotyped using 62,423 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers and phenotyped for the two traits at three different developmental stages over two locations in order to identify their quantitative trait nucleotides (QTNs) using compressed mixed linear model (CMLM) and multi-locus random-SNP-effect mixed linear model (mrMLM) approaches.