Abd El-Hafeez Zohry – författare

This book tackles the issue of using crop rotation to increase food production and secure it for the growing population of the future.  Crop rotation can be a solution of food gaps in the developing counties. Crop rotation plays an important role in attaining soil sustainability and in controlling pests and weeds.  It can alleviate damage caused by climate change by reducing losses in productivity of the crops, minimizing soil fertility loss and increase irrigation water productivity.  This book also includes the reviews of a large number of crop rotations that have been published internationally, and additionally, the crop rotations that have been implemented in Egypt have a unique characteristic to them and therefore, a large number of those reviews have also been included.

This book focuses on proving that deficit irrigation could play an important role in increasing food production in times of water scarcity. Although the application of deficit irrigation can involve loss in crop productivity, it still secures water to be use in cultivating more lands and producing more food. The following questions are discussed and the authors offer solutions to these problems:

Will the production, on a national level, resulting  from these new added areas compensate yield losses attained by application of deficit irrigation?

Is it possible to use deficit irrigation practice to reduce the applied irrigation water to certain crops that have a surplus in their production, and direct this saved water to cultivate new areas with crops have low self-sufficiency ratios?

This book will appeal to students and researchers involved with water scarcity and food security.

This book tackles the main feature of water-smart, soil-smart and crop-smart practices and their integration to sustainably enhance food production. The book includes some insights on the implications of using climate-smart practices in irrigated and rain-fed agriculture, and  suggests approaches to eradicate the negative effects of water scarcity, climate variability and climate change. The book reviews the most important crops resilient to climate variability and their resistance to other biotic and abiotic stresses, and contains the existing practices in Egypt that achieved the three pillars of climate-smart agriculture

The world population is steadily increases with high rate in the past decade from 7,126 billion inhibitors in 2012 to 8,095 billion inhibitors in 2024, with 14% increase. In the meantime, the number of severely food insecure people were 604.5 million in 2014, which increased by 53% in 2020 to reach 927.6 million people. These numbers raise large concerns about the future of food production to feed these continually growing population. Lately, many developing countries rely on importing large quantities of crops, such as wheat, maize, and rice to meet their food and feed needs. The negative impact of climate change and its consequences, namely high temperature causing low crops productivity and water scarcity, which causing great disruptions in food production systems. Therefore, increasing the production of cereal crops worldwide can be achieved through increasing average yield per unit area or expanding the area devoted to cereals into more marginal lands. Moreover, breeding for more resilient cultivars, which can release its potential yield could play an important role in increasing total production under the adverse growth conditions.

Inclusion of legume crops, such as soybean, peanut, and cowpea in cereal-based cropping systems is a viable strategy to increase production of cereal crops. It also helps in reducing the use of chemical fertilizer. It has been reported that intercropping legume crops with cereal crops can increase the productivity of both crops. Additionally, an increase in soil nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium has been also reported when legume crops were included in cereal-based cropping system. It has been also reported that inclusion of legume crops increases the soil water-holding capacity and water used efficiency. Thus, inclusion of legume crops in cereal-based cropping systems can increase its productivity, as well as attains the sustainable use of soil and water resources.

In this book, we will thoroughly tackle the benefits of the integration of legume crops within cereal-based cropping system, namely wheat, maize and rice (paddy and upland) under the changing climate (current and future). We also reviewed the innovations and interventions that could sustainably intensify the production of cereals to reduce hunger and poverty. We will use both modeling and simulation approaches to assess the impact of climate change using CMIP6 mean projection of two future scenarios, namely SSP1-2.6 and SSP5-8.5 in two time-intervals (2060-2079 and 2080-2099) on the yield and water requirements of wheat, maize and rice (paddy and upland).  

This book provides state-of-the art analysis, never done before in Egypt, on agro-climatic zones level. This study deals with how the national cropping pattern can be modified to overcome abiotic stresses, such as water scarcity, induced salinity and climate change to reduce their negative effects on food production. To this end, different cropping patterns are suggested. 

This study can be a framework for other developing countries to be used in quantifying and filling the gap in their knowledge about practices that can help in increasing their food security through increasing food production. Furthermore, the study is useful for policy makers to help them in their future plans and policies.