Abstract: This chapter highlights the application of physiological principles to elucidate and overcome environmental constraints to yield of individual crops and to illustrate how a commercial company utilizes principles of crop physiology and modeling to whole-farm risk management with a focus on productivity and environmental outcomes. The combinations of crops and environments analyzed, the concept of a critical period for yield determination, and avoidance of water deficit in this period are the keystone for devising cropping practices. Yield stability relies on practices aiming at storage of water between crops, reducing unproductive losses, and avoiding the coincidence of critical periods with uncertain rainfall, high evaporative demand, or both. Increasing land allocated to continuous cropping and the exponential growth in the soybean-sown area generates environmental problems. These are particularly serious in recently cleared tropical and subtropical areas with fragile soils. Maize contribution of carbon to maintain soil organic matter is critical to the preservation of soil resources. Where maize is economically risky, high-yielding wheat or barley allow for both carbon input and profitability. Physiological principles applied to design more profitable systems, where the time dimension of production and profit is made explicit, are the core of a cropping intensification process. This is largely based on variations of wheat/soybean double cropping; new promising variants have also emerged such as maize/soybean and sunflower/soybean intercropping and canola/soybean double cropping.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 65
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