In country, non-target arthropod (NTA) field evaluations are required to comply with the regulatory process for cultivation of genetically modified (GM) maize in Mexico. Two sets of field trials, Experimental Phase and Pilot Phase, were conducted to identify any potential harm of insect-protected and glyphosate-tolerant maize (MON-89Ø34-3 × MON-88Ø17-3 and MON-89Ø34-3 × MON-ØØ6Ø3-6) and glyphosatetolerant maize (MON-ØØ6Ø3-6) to local NTAs compared to conventional maize. NTA abundance data were collected at 32 sites, providing high geographic and environmental diversity within maize production areas from four ecological regions (ecoregions) in northern Mexico. The most abundant herbivorous taxa collected included field crickets, corn flea beetles, rootworm beetles, cornsilk flies, aphids, leafhoppers, plant bugs and thrips while the most abundant beneficial taxa captured were soil mites, spiders, predatory ground beetles, rove beetles, springtails (Collembola), predatory earwigs, ladybird beetles, syrphid flies, tachinid flies, minute pirate bugs, parasitic wasps and lacewings.Across the taxa analysed, no statistically significant differences in abundance were detected between GM maize and the conventional maize control for 69 of the 74 comparisons (93.2%) indicating that the single or stacked insect-protected and herbicide-tolerant GM traits generally exert no marked adverse effects on the arthropod populations compared with conventional maize. The distribution of taxa observed in this study provides evidence that irrespective of variations in overall biodiversity of a given ecoregion, important herbivore, predatory and parasitic arthropod taxa within the commercial maize agroecosystem are highly similar indicating that relevant data generated in one ecoregion can be transportable for the risk assessment of the same or similar GM crop in another ecoregion.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Agricultural wastes come from different farming and planting activities that can be used as main material for organic fertilizers and compost. To improve the quality of the compost, it is better to include earthworms in the mixture to become vermicompost. Vermicompost is made up of enriched fertilizer with the production of earthworm known as worm biomass. The preparation of the vermicompost consists of grinding the waste in tiny bits and mixing manually which consumes a lot time and effort. This study focuses on the design of a dual grinding mixing machine intended for vermicompost and worm biomass production. The earthworm used in this study is African Night Crawler species. There are 13 testing vermicompost beds used for the experiment. The machine reduced the preparation time to one-third compared to manual operation. There is increase in the production of vermicompost by 87.5 kg and worm biomass by 3.5 kg, respectively, in monthly basis.
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