The present study was conducted in 2009–10 with the objective to monitor the effect of restorative soil management practices on biological soil quality. The experiment was initiated in 1995 in a strip–split–split plot design with three replications. Sorghum and castor were grown in two-year rotations.

Original Source

Sorghum vegetative tissues are becoming increasingly important for biofuel production. The composition of sorghum stem tissues is influenced by genotype, environment and photoperiod sensitivity, and varies widely between varieties and also between different stem tissues (outer rind vs inner pith).

Original Source

Wheat, rice, maize, pearl millet, and sorghum provide over half of the world's food calories. To maintain global food security, with the added challenge of climate change, there is an increasing need to exploit existing genetic variability and develop cultivars with superior genetic yield potential and stress adaptation. The opportunity to share knowledge between crops and identify priority traits for future research can be exploited to increase breeding impacts and assist in identifying the genetic loci that control adaptation.

How rainfall arrives, in terms of its frequency, intensity and the timing and duration of rainy season, may have a large influence on rainfed agriculture. However, a thorough assessment of these effects is largely missing. This study combines a new synthetic rainfall model and two independently-validated crop models (APSIM and SARRA-H) to assess sorghum yield response to possible shifts in seasonal rainfall characteristics in West Africa.

Improving environmental adaptation in crops is essential for food security under global change, but phenotyping adaptive traits remains a major bottleneck. If associations between single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) alleles and environment of origin in crop landraces reflect adaptation, then these could be used to predict phenotypic variation for adaptive traits. We tested this proposition in the global food crop Sorghum bicolor, characterizing 1943 georeferenced landraces at 404,627 SNPs and quantifying allelic associations with bioclimatic and soil gradients.

Feeding a growing global population in a changing climate presents a significant challenge to society. The projected yields of crops under a range of agricultural and climatic scenarios are needed to assess food security prospects. Previous meta-analyses have summarized climate change impacts and adaptive potential as a function of temperature, but have not examined uncertainty, the timing of impacts, or the quantitative effectiveness of adaptation.

Understanding the effects of actions undertaken by human societies on crop evolution processes is a major challenge for the conservation of genetic resources. This study investigated the mechanisms whereby social boundaries associated with patterns of ethnolinguistic diversity have influenced the on-farm distribution of sorghum diversity. Social boundaries limit the diffusion of planting material, practices and knowledge, thus shaping crop diversity in situ.

Phytolith occluded carbon (PhytOC) which is stable in the soil environment is considered to be an important
fraction of soil organic carbon and substantially contributes to the terrestrial carbon sequestration for long periods (millennia). Phytoliths are silica bodies produced by plants as a result of biomineralization process. During this process, occlusion of carbon also takes place within the phytoliths. Some of the major agricultural crops like barley, maize, rice, sorghum, sugarcane and wheat are known to be prolific producers of phytolith and PhytOC. In India, an estimate

Waterlogging and secondary salinisation have become serious problems in canal irrigated areas of arid and semi-arid regions. This study examined hydrology and estimated the seasonal net groundwater recharge of an irrigated semi-arid region located in the Haryana State of India where about 500 000 ha area are waterlogged and unproductive, and the size of the waterlogged area is increasing, causing a threat to agricultural sustainability.

The article reviews and summarizes the climate change mitigation and adaptation work undertaken by ICRISAT. The effects of climate change are already being experienced in several parts of the world. Even though the effects of climate change will be felt over all kinds of agricultural production systems, they will be more pronounced in dryland areas