Reduced tillage and crop diversification can improve productivity and profitability of rice-based rotations of the Eastern Gangetic Plains.

Intensive rice ()-based cropping systems in south Asia provide much of the calorie and protein requirements of low to middle-income rural and urban populations. Intensive tillage practices demand more resources, damage soil quality, and reduce crop yields and profit margins. Crop diversification along with conservation agriculture (CA)-based management practices may reduce external input use, improve resource-use efficiency, and increase the productivity and profitability of intensive cropping systems.

Performance of a hermetic device and neem () in storing wheat seed: Evidence from participatory household trials in central Bangladesh.

Smallholder farmers in Bangladesh often use low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags contained within woven polypropylene bags to store wheat seed during the summer monsoon that precedes winter season planting. High humidity and temperature during this period can encourage increased seed moisture and pests, thereby lowering seed quality. Following a farm household survey conducted to inform trial design, eighty farmers were engaged in an action research process in which they participated in designing and conducting trials comparing traditional and alternative seed storage methods over 30 weeks.

Response and resilience of Asian agrifood systems to COVID-19: An assessment across twenty-five countries and four regional farming and food systems.

Context: The COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting health and economies across the world, although the nature of direct and indirect effects on Asian agrifood systems and food security has not yet been well understood.

Objectives: This paper assesses the initial responses of major farming and food systems to COVID-19 in 25 Asian countries, and considers the implications for resilience, food and nutrition security and recovery policies by the governments.

Methods: A conceptual systems model was specified including key pathways linking the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19 to the resilience and performance of the four principal Asian farming and food systems, viz, lowland rice based; irrigated wheat based; hill mixed; and dryland mixed systems.

The immediate impact of the first waves of the global COVID-19 pandemic on agricultural systems worldwide: Reflections on the COVID-19 special issue for agricultural systems.

Context: In May 2020, approximately four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the journal's editorial team realized there was an opportunity to collect information from a diverse range of agricultural systems on how the pandemic was playing out and affecting the functioning of agricultural systems worldwide.

Objective: The objective of the special issue was to rapidly collect information, analysis and perspectives from as many regions as possible on the initial impacts of the pandemic on global agricultural systems, The overall goal for the special issue was to develop a useful repository for this information as well as to use the journal's international reach to share this information with the agricultural systems research community and journal readership.

Methods: The editorial team put out a call for a special issue to capture the initial effects of the pandemic on the agricultural sector.

Seed priming with selenium and zinc nanoparticles modifies germination, growth, and yield of direct-seeded rice (Oryza sativa L.).

Direct-seeded rice (DSR) seeds are often exposed to multiple environmental stresses in the field, leading to poor emergence, growth and productivity. Appropriate seed priming agents may help to overcome these challenges by ensuring uniform seed germination, and better seedling stand establishment. To examine the effectiveness of sodium selenite (Na-selenite), sodium selenate (Na-selenate), zinc oxide nanoparticles (ZnO-NPs), and their combinations as priming agents for DSR seeds, a controlled pot experiment followed by a field experiment over two consecutive years was conducted on a sandy clay loam soil (Inceptisol) in West Bengal, India.

Replacing winter rice in non-traditional areas by strawberry reduces arsenic bioaccumulation, and improves water productivity and profitability.

Use of huge amount (1450-1650 mm) of arsenic contaminated (14.0-24.5 mg l) ground water to irrigate winter rice resulted in high deposition of arsenic (As) in the topsoil and in rice grains, posing a serious threat to soil and human health of the Bengal basin.

Multi-faceted impact and outcome of COVID-19 on smallholder agricultural systems: Integrating qualitative research and fuzzy cognitive mapping to explore resilient strategies.

The shock of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has disrupted food systems worldwide. Such disruption, affecting multiple systems interfaces in smallholder agriculture, is unprecedented and needs to be understood from multi-stakeholder perspectives. The multiple loops of causality in the pathways of impact renders the system outcomes unpredictable.

Optimal design and setting of rotary strip-tiller blades to intensify dry season cropping in Asian wet clay soil conditions.

Fine-textured clayey soils dominate Asian rice fields that are kept either fallow or cultivated with non-rice crops after harvest of monsoon rice. Use of seeding machinery compatible with the principles of conservation agriculture on such soils, however, has not been promising. Under these conditions - which predominate the population and poverty dense areas of coastal South Asia - such machinery fails to open a furrow or throws excessive soil out of the tilled furrow during strip-till seeding.

Multi-year weed community dynamics and rice yields as influenced by tillage, crop establishment, and weed control: Implications for rice-maize rotations in the eastern Gangetic plains.

In South Asia's rice-based cropping systems, most farmers flood and repetitively till their fields before transplanting. This establishment method, commonly termed puddled transplanted rice (TPR), is costly. In addition, it is labor and energy intensive.

COVID-19 impacts on agriculture and food systems in Nepal: Implications for SDGs.

The objective of this study was to understand the impacts of COVID-19 crisis in agriculture and food systems in Nepal and assess the effectiveness of measures to deal with this crisis. The study draws policy implications, especially for farming systems resilience and the achievement of SDGs 1 and 2. The findings are based on (i) three panel discussions over six months with policy makers and experts working at grassroots to understand and manage the crisis, (ii) key informants' interviews, and (iii) an extensive literature review.

Estimating yield gaps at the cropping system level.

Yield gap analyses of individual crops have been used to estimate opportunities for increasing crop production at local to global scales, thus providing information crucial to food security. However, increases in crop production can also be achieved by improving cropping system yield through modification of spatial and temporal arrangement of individual crops. In this paper we define the cropping system yield potential as the output from the combination of crops that gives the highest energy yield per unit of land and time, and the cropping system yield gap as the difference between actual energy yield of an existing cropping system and the cropping system yield potential.