Low-emission rice practices are implemented on individual fields, but their feasibility often depends on shared irrigation, machinery, information and finance. This perspective paper develops a conditional model of the rice cluster as carbon infrastructure. Its contribution is not the claim that collective farming is new, but the specification of when an organization becomes carbon-ready: it must connect a hydrologically meaningful boundary, coordinated mitigation, a common measurement, reporting and verification protocol, transparent cost accounting, and enforceable benefit-sharing. Clustering is justified only when savings in measurement and transaction costs exceed the additional costs of coordination, governance and collective action. Evidence from studies of alternate wetting and drying and cooperative upgrading in Vietnam, together with the emerging rice-cluster architecture in the Philippines, shows both the potential and limits of aggregation. This aper proposes differentiated co-financing in which public funds support shared infrastructure and fixed measurement costs, farmers or value-chain actors co-invest in productive assets according to capacity and expected benefit, and verified-performance payments are distributed under disclosed rules. The appropriate near-term objective is verified emission reduction; carbon neutrality remains a whole-system, long-term claim requiring complete accounting of residual emissions and credible balancing.
Camellia oleifera orchard navigation presents considerable challenges, including the limited field of view of ground robots, discontinuous crop rows, and complex shadow interference. To address these challenges, this study proposes a UAV-based method for inter-row navigation line detection using an improved DSConv-YOLOv11 model. The Global Attention Mechanism is incorporated into the YOLOv11n backbone to enhance the model’s ability to focus on canopy features, while the original C3k2 module is replaced with C3k2_DySnakeConv to improve the extraction of geometric features associated with curved canopies and inter-row gaps. Navigation lines are generated through K-Means clustering of canopy center points, outlier removal, and cubic spline fitting. The improved model achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 85.3%, representing a 5.2-percentage-point improvement over YOLOv11n, with an inference time of 303.33 ms per aerial image. The generated navigation lines achieve an average crop row detection accuracy (CRDA) exceeding 0.73 compared with manually annotated paths, with a mean heading deviation of 5.25° and a lateral deviation of 11.62 pixels. Comparative experiments using a C. oleifera picking robot further demonstrate that the extracted navigation paths are generally consistent with the robot’s actual driving trajectory and meet the requirements of inter-row operations. The proposed method provides a feasible technical solution for detecting inter-row navigation lines in C. oleifera orchards from a low-altitude remote-sensing perspective.
Soil microbial communities and their co-occurrence networks are central to nutrient cycling and ecosystem functioning in agricultural soils, however, how environmental factors regulate their reorganization at regional scales remains poorly understood. Using a paired paddy-upland sampling design comprising 171 soil samples from Ningbo, Zhejiang, China, this study combined soil physicochemical analyses, amplicon sequencing, random forest modeling and network-based approaches to determine how soil pH shapes microbial community structure, network topology and the relative roles of abundant and rare taxa among different land-use types. The results revealed that soil pH was the primary determinant of microbial community structure in both paddy and upland soils, acting as a major environmental filter shaping microbial community differentiation (Mantel’s r = 0.523–0.735 for paddy soil and 0.276–0.668 for upland soil). In addition, soil pH was closely associated with network reorganization, and microbial networks in paddy and upland soils had non-linear and contrasting response patterns to pH gradient, indicating that the effect of pH on co-occurrence patterns was strongly dependent on land use. Rare taxa were found to be potentially important structural components in maintaining network continuity during pH-driven reorganization and their relative importance in bacterial networks increased with pH in paddy soils. Collectively, these findings reveal non-linear and habitat-dependent pH responses of agricultural soil microbiomes, highlight a potential role of rare taxa in maintaining network continuity during pH-associated reorganization, and indicate that soil pH regulation should be tailored to land-use type to help sustain microbial network stability in both paddy and upland soils.
With escalating global food demands and environmental concerns from mineral fertilizers, black soldier fly larvae (BSFL, Hermetia illucens) frass is a sustainable organic fertilizer from organic waste. This review synthesizes field applications, agronomic impacts, soil health benefits, comparative efficacy and market prospects. Applied via soil incorporation or topdressing at 60–250 kg·ha–1 N, frass significantly increases crop yields in maize, vegetables (broccoli, lettuce, potato and tomato) and forages, often equaling or surpassing urea or compost. Yield gains from balanced macro- and micronutrients, high organic matter and biostimulant effects, including upregulated defense genes against herbivores and drought resilience via improved photosynthesis. Frass profoundly enhances soil health: chemically, by boosting nutrients and cation exchange capacity; physically, through aggregation and water retention; biologically, via microbial stimulation and enzyme activity. Compared to mineral fertilizers, it offers slow-release N (shorter immobilization, 3–10 times higher mineralization), without leaching risks, and chitin-derived pathogen suppression. Market analyses forecast the overall black soldier fly (BSF) sector to reach 4.12 billion USD by 2032 (32.4% compound annual growth rate), with the biofertilizer (frass) segment as a major contributor driven by circular economy and organic demand. Challenges include feedstock variability, regulatory and standardization gaps. Future research on long-term effects, integrated management and life-cycle assessments will accelerate adoption of BSFL frass as a component of circular, resilient agriculture.
Soil magnesium (Mg) deficiency limits sugarcane yield and quality, underscoring the need for optimized Mg fertilization. A field experiment was conducted to compare the effects of three types of Mg fertilizer (magnesium sulfate, silicon-magnesium, and boron-magnesium-zinc) on sugarcane yield, nutrient utilization, and the microbial community. Compared with the optimized fertilization treatment (OPT), all three Mg application treatments increased the 2-year average sugarcane yield, with the greatest increase observed in the OPT plus boron-magnesium-zinc fertilizer treatment (OPT+BMgZn). The use efficiencies of phosphorus, potassium, and Mg fertilizer were significantly greater in the OPT+BMgZn treatment than in OPT. Compared with the OPT, the bacterial Chao1 index increased in the Mg application treatments, whereas the fungal Chao1 and Shannon indices were unaffected (P < 0.05). Moreover, compared with OPT, the relative abundances of the plant growth-promoting microorganisms Bradyrhizobium, Acidothermus, and Conexibacter increased in the OPT+BMgZn treatment, whereas those of the pathogenic microorganisms Fusarium and Vanrija decreased in all Mg application treatments. Functional prediction revealed enrichment of predatory or exoparasitic functions in the bacterial community and reduced fungal pathotrophs in all Mg application treatments compared with OPT. Correlation analysis revealed that sugarcane yield and nutrient uptake were positively correlated with exchangeable Mg2+; bacterial community composition and function were primarily affected by available phosphorus and pH, whereas fungal composition and function were mainly influenced by available potassium and exchangeable Mg2+. Overall, integrating sugarcane yield, nutrient use efficiency, and microbial community structure and function identified OPT+BMgZn as the optimal Mg fertilization strategy for acidic red soils in South China.
