Organic Farming, Pest Control and Remediation of Soil Pollutants
Sustainable agriculture is a rapidly growing field aiming at producing food and energy in a sustainable way for humans and their children. Sustainable agriculture is a discipline that addresses current issues such as climate change, increasing food and fuel prices, poor-nation starvation, rich-nation obesity, water pollution, soil erosion, fertility loss, pest control, and biodiversity depletion. Novel, environmentally-friendly solutions are proposed based on integrated knowledge from sciences as diverse as agronomy, soil science, molecular biology, chemistry, toxicology, ecology, economy, and social sciences. Indeed, sustainable agriculture decipher mechanisms of processes that occur from the molecular level to the farming system to the global level at time scales ranging from seconds to centuries. For that, scientists use the system approach that involves studying components and interactions of a whole system to address scientific, economic and social issues. In that respect, sustainable agriculture is not a classical, narrow science. Instead of solving problems using the classical painkiller approach that treats only negative impacts, sustainable agriculture treats problem sources. Because most actual society issues are now intertwined, global, and fast-developing, sustainable agriculture will bring solutions to build a safer world. This book series gathers review articles that analyze current agricultural issues and knowledge, then propose alternative solutions. It will therefore help all scientists, decision-makers, professors, farmers and politicians who wish to build a safe agriculture, energy and food system for future generations.
Contents
Preface: Sustainable agriculture as a central science to solve global society issues - Eric Lichtfouse
Foreword: Mother of necessity: the soil - Rattan Lal
1. Introductory article: Technology without wisdom - Rattan Lal
2. Transgenic cotton for sustainable pest management - Jorge B. Torres
3. Conservation Agriculture, a different approach for crop production through sustainable soil and water management - Fabio Stagnari
3. Recurrent mass selection for routine improvement of common wheat - GF Marais
4. Rotation design: a critical factor for sustainable crop production in a semiarid climate - Randy L. Anderson
5. Parasitic plants in agriculture: chemical ecology of germination and host-plant location as targets for sustainable control - Consuelo M. De Moraes
6. Rice seed invigoration - Muhammad Farooq
7. Soil management for sustainable crop disease control - Reza Ghorbani
8. Soil protection through organic farming - Eva Erhart
9. Surfactants in sludge-amended agricultural soils - Alicia Fernández Cirelli
10. Mineral nutrition for legume-rhizobia symbiosis: B, Ca, N, P, S, K, Fe, Mo, Co, and Ni - Luis Bolaños
11. Uncommon heavy metals, metalloids and their plant toxicity - Rene Kizek
12. Role of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria in the remediation of metal contaminated soils - Mohammad Saghir Khan
13. Phosphates for Pb immobilization in soils - Patricia Miretzky Vior
14. Cadmium phytotoxicity: responses, mechanisms and mitigation strategies - Abdul Wahid
