Freshly Printed - allow 10 days lead
Couldn't load pickup availability
Six Chemicals That Changed Agriculture
The challenges and opportunities of the use of key agricultural-use chemicals are presented, compared and contrasted with the real and frequently assumed problems that follow use
Robert L Zimdahl (Author)
9780128005613, Elsevier Science
Hardback, published 31 July 2015
216 pages
22.9 x 15.1 x 2 cm, 0.41 kg
Six Chemicals That Changed Agriculture is a scientific look at how the chemicals used in today's food production were developed, evaluated, and came to be in wide-spread use. From fertilizers to pest management, antibiotics to DNA, chemicals have transformed the way our food is grown, protected, and processed. Agriculture is the world's most important environment interaction, the essential human activity, and an increasingly controversial activity because of its use and presumed misuse of chemistry. The major characteristics of US agriculture for at least the last six decades have been rising productivity, declining number of mid-size farms, increasing farm size, an increasing percentage of farm production on fewer, large farms, increasing dependence of chemical technology and more developmental research being done by the agricultural chemical industry rather than by independent land-grant universities. Another equally important feature of modern agriculture is wide-spread suspicion of its technology by the public. The book will recount examples of this suspicion related to specific chemicals and present the essence of the suspicion and its results.
1. Introduction 2. The Characteristics of Modern Agriculture Enabled by Chemicals3. Lime: A Soil Amendment4. Nitrogen5. Phosphorus6. 2,4-D: An Herbicide7. DDT: An Insecticide8. Recombinant DNA9. Antibiotics10. Conclusion
Subject Areas: Agricultural science [TVB], Life sciences: general issues [PSA]
