Renato de Mello Prado – författare

The sugarcane industry faces a number of challenges in terms of stagnating production, price regulations, unstable sugarcane market, and water scarcity/drought. This new book summarizes cultivation and sugarcane crop production strategies and related sustainability issues. The book covers topics related to sugarcane plantation and growth such as the impact of various stressors along with environment stress management in sugarcane crops, major sugarcane pests and their control, use of plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPRs) in improving sugarcane yield, role of plant secondary metabolism in sugarcane during unfavorable environmental conditions, and more.

The sugarcane industry faces a number of challenges in terms of stagnating production, price regulations, unstable sugarcane market, and water scarcity/drought. This new book summarizes cultivation and sugarcane crop production strategies and related sustainability issues. The book covers topics related to sugarcane plantation and growth such as the impact of various stressors along with environment stress management in sugarcane crops, major sugarcane pests and their control, use of plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPRs) in improving sugarcane yield, role of plant secondary metabolism in sugarcane during unfavorable environmental conditions, and more.

This textbook aims to describe the role of minerals in plant life cycle; how these nutrients are absorbed, distributed, stored; what functions each mineral plays and the disorders that their excess or absence may cause. From an agronomic perspective, such knowledge is key to boost crop production and improve its quality, and it also helps understand how to better manage fertilizers and prevent environmental issues. The book has focus on tropical agriculture and its specific demands, providing examples of major crops (such as sugarcane, soybeans, coffee etc), silviculture and pasture species.

This book addresses the most innovative topics on silicon to ensure sustainability in agriculture, including advances in nanotechnology and the impact on human health. It provides innovative information on the mineral nutrition of plants with a focus on the beneficial element silicon that has attracted the attention and interest of researchers. This is happening because silicon is the only element in plant nutrition that is capable of mitigating the greatest number of stressful events during plant cultivation. Faced with climate change associated with disease pressure due to the use of transgenic cultivars that decreases genetic variability and increases the occurrence of stress in crops. Associated with this, there is a need to reduce the use of chemical pesticides in crops to favor agro-environmental sustainability and thus increases the need for the use of silicon in agriculture. This is important because the main goal of plant mineral nutrition is to meet the demand of the plant and consequently of man and his nutritional requirements, but there is a lack of work to integrate the benefits of Si in plants and consequently its reflections on human health. The information in this work will drive further research to expand knowledge and the benefits of Si in sustainable agriculture and human health, and therefore, the target audience would be researchers, professors, students from universities and research institutes, as well as company technicians.

This book addresses the relevance of tropical pastures and the challenges they face in terms of soil fertility, productivity, and sustainability. These pastures are characterized by highly weathered soils, low fertility, acidity, high aluminum saturation, poor management, and low technological investment, leading to inevitable degradation. The 15 chapters in this publication cover a wide range of topics related to pasture nutrition and fertilization. Readers will find in this work basic concepts, a brief history, and advances and challenges in forage plant nutrition as well as the importance of proper establishment and maintenance of pastures for high productivity and sustainability. It highlights the need for diagnostic practices, monitoring soil fertility and plant nutrition in conservation agricultural systems.