This paper aims to contribute to guaranteeing the stable development and enhancing the understanding of ecological agriculture of Chinese materia medica so that the national strategy and industrial demand can be better served. It first introduces current traditional Chinese medicine(TCM)policy and industrial development status from five aspects, including policy guarantee, theoretical support, technological innovation, standardization system, and brand influence. Then, the paper analyzes the development dilemma of TCM agriculture in production and quality increase and ecological environment protection. It also proposes the development goals of ecological agriculture of Chinese materia medica that meet the current industrial development demand, which are reducing chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and carbon emissions, improving quality, increasing efficiency, and protecting ecological environment. In addition, the new development goals are interpreted through case studies. Finally, this paper proposes four development strategies for ecological agriculture of Chinese materia medica: conducting research on the pattern and spatial and temporal variations of nationwide TCM production areas; studying the internal and external ecological memories of medicinal plant growth from the perspectives of genetic variations and environmental adaptation variations and elucidating their contributions to the formation of quality; carrying out selection and breeding of stress-resistant varieties for ecological agriculture of Chinese materia medica, the optimization of key technologies for soil improvement and restoration and green prevention and control against diseases and pests, and the improvement of quality; carrying out research on the quality assurance and value realization of ecological products made from TCM. This research can provide guidance for policy formulation, theoretical development of the discipline, and the enhancement of industrial technology for ecological agriculture of Chinese materia medica.
Agriculture/methods* ; China ; Drugs, Chinese Herbal ; Plants, Medicinal/chemistry* ; Ecosystem ; Materia Medica ; Medicine, Chinese Traditional

Agriculture, the strategic cornerstone of national long-term stability, is undergoing a fundamental shift from resource-dependent to technology-driven, driven by global food security and ecological conservation needs. Traditional agriculture can no longer sustain the growing food demand. Scientific and technological advancements are fundamental guarantees for ensuring food supply security and are the primary driver for future agricultural development. This special issue compiles the latest research advancements from diverse experts, covering fields such as microbe-driven green agriculture, pesticide technology innovation, intelligent agricultural machinery, smart manufacturing, and molecular design breeding fundamentals. It aims to inspire researchers to explore cutting-edge directions in future agriculture, promote interdisciplinary collaboration and technological integration, and thereby drive innovative breakthroughs and industrial transformation in agricultural modernization.
Agriculture/methods* ; Crops, Agricultural/genetics* ; Food Supply ; Biotechnology ; Pesticides

The production of healthy agricultural products has increased the demand for innovative and sustainable plant protection technologies, and the rapid advancement of nanotechnology has brought revolutionary breakthroughs to traditional agriculture. Nanocarrier-based drug delivery systems can not only significantly improve the utilization efficiency of pesticides, achieving enhanced efficacy and reduced application, but also decrease the pesticide residues and environmental pollution. Additionally, they have made breakthrough progress in the stability and persistence of RNA pesticides. This review summarized the research progress on nanopesticides and RNA pesticides, focusing on the mechanisms of nanocarriers in improving pesticide bioactivity and RNA interference (RNAi) efficiency. It also systematically summarized the types of nanomaterials and their applications in pest and disease management and provided an in-depth outlook for the future development of nanopesticides and RNA pesticides, which provided technical support for the high-quality development of agriculture in the future.
Pesticides/chemistry* ; Nanotechnology ; Nanostructures ; RNA ; Agriculture/methods* ; RNA Interference ; Drug Delivery Systems

Accurately obtaining the crop quantity and density is not only crucial for the demand-based input of water and fertilizer in the field but also vital for ensuring the yield and quality of crops. Aerial photography by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can quickly acquire the distribution image information of crops over a large area. However, the accurate recognition of a single type of dense targets is a huge challenge for most recognition algorithms. Taking banana seedlings as an example in this study, we captured the images of banana plantations by UAVs from high altitudes to explore an efficient recognition method for dense targets. We proposed a strategy of "cut-recognition-stitch" and constructed a counting method based on the improved Faster R-CNN algorithm. First, the images containing highly dense targets were cropped into a large number of image tiles according to different sizes (simulating different flight altitudes), and the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) algorithm was adopted to improve the image quality. A banana seedling dataset containing 36 000 image tiles was constructed. Then, the Faster R-CNN network with optimized parameters was used to train the banana seedling recognition model. Finally, the recognition results were reversely stitched together, and a boundary deduplication algorithm was designed to correct the final counting results to reduce the repeated recognition caused by image cropping. The results show that the recognition accuracy of the Faster R-CNN with optimized parameters for banana image datasets of different sizes can reach up to 0.99 at most. The deduplication algorithm can reduce the average counting error for the original aerial images from 1.60% to 0.60%, and the average counting accuracy of banana seedlings reaches 99.4%. The proposed method effectively addresses the challenge of recognizing dense small objects in high-resolution aerial images, providing an efficient and reliable technical solution for intelligent crop density monitoring in precision agriculture.
Musa/growth & development* ; Crops, Agricultural/growth & development* ; Algorithms ; Neural Networks, Computer ; Unmanned Aerial Devices ; Seedlings/growth & development* ; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted/methods* ; Photography ; Agriculture/methods*

Recently, returning straw to the fields has been proved as a direct and effective method to tackle soil nutrient loss and agricultural pollution. Meanwhile, the slow decomposition of straw may harm the growth of the next crop. This study aimed to determine the effects of rumen microorganisms (RMs) on straw decomposition, bacterial microbial community structure, soil properties, and soil enzyme activity. The results showed that RMs significantly enhanced the degradation rate of straw in the soil, reaching 39.52%, which was 41.37% higher than that of the control on the 30th day after straw return. After 30 d, straw degradation showed a significant slower trend in both the control and the experimental groups. According to the soil physicochemical parameters, the application of rumen fluid expedited soil matter transformation and nutrient buildup, and increased the urease, sucrase, and cellulase activity by 10%‒20%. The qualitative analysis of straw showed that the hydroxyl functional group structure of cellulose in straw was greatly damaged after the application of rumen fluid. The analysis of soil microbial community structure revealed that the addition of rumen fluid led to the proliferation of Actinobacteria with strong cellulose degradation ability, which was the main reason for the accelerated straw decomposition. Our study highlights that returning rice straw to the fields with rumen fluid inoculation can be used as an effective measure to enhance the biological value of recycled rice straw, proposing a viable solution to the problem of sluggish straw decomposition.
Animals ; Rumen/metabolism* ; Agriculture/methods* ; Soil/chemistry* ; Microbiota ; Bacteria/metabolism* ; Oryza/metabolism* ; Soil Microbiology ; Cellulose

Gastrodia elata is a kind of precious traditional Chinese medicine. In the process of cultivation of G. elata, due to the influence of continuous cropping obstacles and other factors, the fungus materials and land that have been planted with G. elata are often abandoned, resulting in a great waste of resources. Based on the planting characteristics of G. elata and Phallus impudicus and the previous research experience in ecological agriculture, this paper analyzed the ecological adaptability characteristics of G. elata and P. impudicus, and summarized the key techniques of the G. elata-P. impudicus sequential planting pattern. Keeping track of the planting area, fungus-growing materials consumption and market sales of G. elata-P. impudicus sequential planting pattern, the ecological benefits of G. elata-P. impudicus sequential planting pattern from the aspects of utilization rate of fungus-growing materials were analyzed, the value of land resources per unit area, ecological environmental protection, labor cost and economic benefits were consi-dered. The technical principle of G. elata-P. impudicus sequential planting pattern was expounded according to their ecological habit, the season of harvest and planting, the difference of composition of fungus-growing materials, and the microbial ecology. The sequential planting pattern of G. elata-P. impudicus not only realized the double production of medicinal materials and edible fungi, reduced the waste of old fungus-growing materials, but also transformed the energy from nutrition-supplied fungi to edible and medicinal fungi, which guaranteed the ecological recycling and utilization of G. elata in the process of cultivation.
Agaricales/growth & development* ; Agriculture/methods* ; Gastrodia/growth & development* ; Medicine, Chinese Traditional ; Plants, Medicinal/growth & development*

Salvia miltiorrhiza is one of the commonly used bulk medicinal materials, which has significant effect on cardiovascular disease, and are heavy demanded in Asia, Europe, North America, Russia and Africa. Consequently, increasing the yield and quality of S. miltiorrhiza has become a major concern worldwide. With the current wild resources of S. miltiorrhiza gradually decreasing, cultivated products occupy most of the markets. However, the cultivation area is widely distributed and the cultivation techniques is different, which lead to the quality and yield of S. miltiorrhiza in consistent. This paper combined visiting survey with document analysis to carry out the cultivation situation of S. miltiorrhiza in main cultivation areas of Shandong, Henan, Sichuan, Shanxi and Hebei provinces. There exist big differences of the ecological environment, mode of cultivation, fertilization, pest control, harvesting processing among the producing areas. We should carry on the ecological suitability zoning analysis and suitable cultivation of each area study to form a pattern of high quality and high yield for the sustainable development of S. miltiorrhiza cultivation.
Agriculture ; methods ; Europe ; Plants, Medicinal ; growth & development ; Salvia miltiorrhiza ; growth & development

BACKGROUND: In recent years, the interest in health and safety in the workplace has increased. Agriculture is one of the human work activities with the highest risk indexes. Studies on risk perception of agricultural workers are often referred to as specific risk factors (especially pesticides), but the risk perception plays an important role in preventing every kind of accident and occupational disease. METHODS: The aim of this research is to test a new method for understanding the relation between risk perception among farmers and the main risk factors to which they are exposed. A secondary aim is to investigate the influence of training in risk perception in agriculture. The data collection was realized using a questionnaire designed to investigate the risk perception; the questionnaire was given to a sample of 119 agricultural workers in central Italy. Through the use of the “principal components analysis” it was possible to highlight and verify the latent dimensions underlying the collected data in comparison with scales of attitudes. RESULTS: Results show that the highest percentage of strong negative attitude is among the people who have worked for more years, while farmers who have worked for fewer years have a marked positive attitude. CONCLUSION: The analysis of the questionnaires through the synthetic index method (Rizzi index) showed that agricultural workers involved, in particular the elderly workers, have a negative attitude towards safety; workers are hostile to safety measures if they have not attended special training courses.
Aged ; Agriculture ; Data Collection ; Farmers* ; Humans ; Italy* ; Methods ; Occupational Diseases ; Passive Cutaneous Anaphylaxis ; Risk Factors ; Surveys and Questionnaires ; Weights and Measures

Trichuris suis infection in pigs is ubiquitous in intensive and extensive farms, which causes potential threat to human health. The objective of this research was to investigate the prevalence of T. suis in pigs in Hunan province. Total 2,267 fresh fecal samples distributed in 28 pig farms from 7 different administrative regions (Hunan province) were evaluated for the existence of T. suis eggs using saturated NaCl floating method. The average infection rate of T. suis in pigs was 8.91% in Hunan province. To determine genetic variation of the gained T. suis isolates in the present study, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions from nuclear ribosomal DNA (rDNA) of 7 T. suis isolates were cloned and analyzed. Nucleotide diversities were 1.0–3.5% and 0–3.8% for ITS-1 and ITS-2, respectively. Phylogenetic analyses indicated that all isolates collected in the present study and T. suis available in Genbank generated a monophyletic clade. The present investigation revealed high infection rates of T. suis in pigs in Hunan province, which shed light on making effective measures to prevent and control T. suis infection in pigs in Hunan province.
Agriculture ; China ; Clone Cells ; Databases, Nucleic Acid ; DNA, Ribosomal ; Eggs ; Genetic Variation ; Humans ; Methods ; Ovum ; Prevalence ; Swine ; Trichuris

In order to set up a technical standard for planting Amomum villosum in wood forest in the future, we analyzed the relationship between the ecological factors and the yield of A. villosum planted in five Dimocarpus imocarpus longan wood forests and five miscellaneous wood forests in Yangchun city, to find out the dominant factors that affect the yield of A. villosum. The results showed that agricultural measures of fertilization, artificial irrigation and removing the old plants were positively correlated with the yield of A. villosum, the pesticide spraying and soil pH value were negatively correlated with the yield of A. villosum. But the effects of ecological factors on the yield were not significantly. High yield regions are generally located in the ravine, two sides of mountain stream and other places where water is more adequate. The slope of cultivated field with high yield is generally less than 30°, lighting and ventilation are more appropriate; soil type is generally sandy or loam, shade density is generally about 50%, and pollinators are many in quantity and variety. And we found that there was a large difference in mineral nutrient contents of soils among ten plantations. Results indicate that the yield of A. villosum is determined by the combination of each ecological factor. Suitable light intensity, moisture, ventilation and reasonable fertilization are conductive to increase the yield of A. villosum, but the use of pesticides and soil alkalization hinder the increase of A. villosum production. Too high shade density and the abuse of pesticides may be the main reason for limiting the yield of A. villosum planted in D. longan wood forests. This study has obtained key techniques of the ecological stereoscopic cultivation mode of A. villosum-D. longan, which lays a theoretical foundation for the guidance of farmers in planting A. villosum in the D. Longan forest in the future.
Agriculture ; methods ; Amomum ; growth & development ; Ecology ; Forests ; Soil ; Water