Farmers used to plant their main crop in September and reap in May or June.
Collectively, CGIAR centres maintain 600, 000 plant varieties in crop genebanks in a global effort to conserve agricultural biodiversity.
If a crop or plant is having a bad season and needs pesticide, the community will stop growing it and go without.
Mr Mugabe said the August deadline would allow new owners of the land enough time to prepare and plant for the new crop season in October.
Finally, as our tale draws closer to its conclusion, we find that the residents of the kingdom of Fairyland at Foggy Bottom have now become so fat and lazy that no one wants to work any more, even if there was a way to plant and harvest a crop.
Ernest Girouard Jr. said he was unable to plant a quarter of his crop.
That's nearly half the population, who must be resettled before the winter rainy season if they are to plant the single annual rice crop.
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It starts with the plant breeders who develop new crop varieties and extends through seed production, farmers who cultivate the crops, grain handlers, transporters and processors, and finally to marketers and retailers.
We all need to eat after all and it takes quite some time, many months at least, to plant and harvest a new food crop.
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The FAO's Abdolreza Abbassian argues that increasing links between farming and other parts of the economy are making it more difficult for farmers to calculate in advance the profitability of any one crop, so the area they plant is tending to fluctuate more sharply from year to year.
In the early 1970s, for example, the cassava mealybug, a pale, flat, plant-eating insect, was destroying the staple crop of 200 million Africans.
Plant biologists have identified genes that regulate water use and transferred them into important crop plants.
Demand for the U.S. crop from Spain, Turkey and Pakistan also has led farmers to plant more.
It provides loans to small farmers, trains them in agronomy and sells them seeds and fertiliser, as well as the saplings they must plant if they cut other trees down for fuel to flue-cure their crop.
The sweet potato is sub-Saharan Africa's first genetically modified crop, and its yields so far are double that of the regular plant.
Crop diseases drew his attention first, inspiring him to turn from forestry to plant pathology under Charles Stakman, a lifelong mentor, at the University of Minnesota.
The results of the experiments, reported in the journal Science, show that the modified plant can thrive even when salt levels are twice the amount that would kill a normal crop of corn.
The BCAP (Biomass Crop Assistance Program), part of the 2008 farm bill, is designed to encourage farmers to plant biomass by cost-sharing the establishment of the crops.
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