Grain Hermetic Storage Adoption in Northern Uganda: Awareness, Use, and the Constraints to Technology Adoption

Post-harvest storage losses (PHLs) remain significant in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) due to several factors mainly insect pests and molds. Hermetic storage technologies (HSTs) are being promoted to address these storage losses. In Uganda, HSTs were first introduced in 2012. However, its use among farming households remains low today. Data were collected from 306 smallholder farmers from four districts of Northern Uganda using a pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire to understand their knowledge, use, and constraints to the adoption of hermetic storage. A multivariate Logit regression model was used to find the significance of the factors affecting adoption. Results showed low awareness and use of hermetic storage among smallholder farmers. Only 53.3% of the interviewed farmers were aware of the use of hermetic storage for grain storage. The SuperGrain bag was the most known form of hermetic storage (35.3%), followed by the Purdue Improved Crop Storage (PICS) bag (34.9%), metallic silo (15.5%), and plastic silo (14.4%). Hermetic storage use was even lower as only 17.6% of the surveyed farmers were using one or more forms of hermetic storage to store their grains. Insect pest management without chemical insecticides was the main reason (83.1%) for hermetic storage use. About 75.5% of those aware of hermetic storage had received training in the technology. Hermetic storage use in farming households led to improved food availability, household income, and nutrition. Lack of local availability (50.2%), high costs (37.8%), and inadequate knowledge (6.9%) were the main constraints hindering the adoption of hermetic storage in Northern Uganda. The logit regression models showed that only training in hermetic storage significantly (p = 0.002) affected farmers’ decision to adopt hermetic storage. Understanding the factors that constrain the adoption of HSTs could provide policymakers with important information to initiate and design policies and programs aimed at reducing crop storage losses.

Carbon and Nitrogen Footprints of Major Cereal Crop Production in China:A Study Based on Farm Management Surveys

Greenhouse gas(GHG)emissions and reactive nitrogen(Nr)releases are central environmental problems,which are closely linked to climate change,environmental ecology and crop production.Sustainable development of agriculture plays an important role in GHG emissions and Nr loss.The life cycle assessment(LCA)method was used to calculate the product and farm carbon footprints(CFs)and nitrogen footprints(NFs)in rice,wheat and maize production in China based on farm survey data.The results pinpointed that the CFs of rice,wheat and maize were 0.87,0.30 and 0.24 kg/kg.Meanwhile,the computed NFs were 17.11,14.26 and 6.83 g/kg,respectively.Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer applications and methane(CH4)emissions were dominant CF sources,while ammonia(NH3)volatilization was the main NF contributor.Moreover,significant decreases in CF and NF by 20%–54%and 33%–61%,respectively,were found in large-size farms(>20 hm^(2))when compared to small-size farms(<0.7 hm^(2)).Furthermore,the significantly positive relationships between CF and NF indicated the potential for simultaneous mitigation in the regions with high agricultural inputs,like amounts of fertilizer.Based on our results,some effective solutions would be favorable toward mitigating climate change and eutrophication of the major cereal crop production in China,especially optimizing fertilizer use and farm machinery operation efficiencies,as well as developing large-size farms with intensive farming.

The supporting capability of Water and land resources for sustainable increase of yield in North China Plain

The potential of yield increase in the North China Plain is about 30 billion kg by ameliorating the low yield and medium low yield farmlands and 4 billion kg by reclaiming unused land. Water shortage will be the main limitation to the further increase of grain crop yield. The amount of water shortage is 8 200 million m3 at present, and will be 17 720 million m3 in 2 000. Yield increase can not be realized by using more water in the future. Other factors such as decrease of the area of cultivated land and the grain crop growing area, deterioration of environment and destruction of resources will also affect the development of grain production. Some suggestions have been proposed in the paper for attaining sustainable increase of yield in the plain.

1998-2018年中国粮食作物化肥利用效率与减施策略研究

This paper studied the fertilizer rate(FR), fertilizer use efficiency(FUE) and fertilizer overuse rate(FOR) of rice, corn and wheat in China from 1998 to 2018 and briefly analysed the reasons why farmers were willing to apply more fertilizers.(1) The FR of grain in China reached 373.7 kg/ha in 2018, an increase of 26.8% compared to that in 1998. In 2018, the FR for corn was the highest, at 411.2 kg/ha, compared to the values of 338.3 kg/ha for rice and 371.7 kg/ha for wheat.(2) In recent years, the FUE of grain in China has obviously improved, with values of 32.9% in 1998, 36.7% in 2008, and 39.3% in 2018. In 2018, the FUE for rice was the highest(41.2%), followed by that for corn(39.9%), and the FUE for wheat was the lowest(36.0%).(3) By 2018, fertilizer was overused in all zones of rice, corn and wheat. In 2018, the average FOR for wheat reached 69.0%, which was 35.9% higher than that for corn and 42.8% higher than that for rice.(4) The lower price of chemical fertilizers was the main reason leading to overapplication.(5) Establishing market mechanisms and adjusting regional planting structures can be effective in reducing the application of chemical fertilizers.

STAG-CNS： An Order-Aware Conserved Noncoding Sequences Discovery Tool for Arbitrary Numbers of Species

One method for identifying noncoding regulatory regions of a genome is to quantify rates of divergence between related species, as functional sequence will generally diverge more slowly. Most approaches to identifying these conserved noncoding sequences （CNSs） based on alignment have had relatively large minimum sequence lengths （≥15 bp） compared with the average length of known transcription factor binding sites. To circumvent this constraint, STAG-CNS that can simultaneously integrate the data from the promoters of conserved orthologous genes in three or more species was developed. Using the data from up to six grass species made it possible to identify conserved sequences as short as 9 bp with false discovery rate ≤0.05. These CNSs exhibit greater overlap with open chromatin regions identified using DNase I hypersensitivity assays, and are enriched in the promoters of genes involved in transcriptional regulation. STAG-CNS was further employed to characterize loss of conserved noncoding sequences associated with retained duplicate genes from the ancient maize polyploidy. Genes with fewer retained CNSs show lower overall expression, although this bias is more apparent in samples of complex organ systems containing many cell types, suggesting that CNS loss may correspond to a reduced number of expression contexts rather than lower expression levels across the entire ancestral expression domain.