The Contribution of Agronomic Management to Sustainably Intensify Egypt’s Wheat Production

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript number: agriculture-2359861 entitled “The contribution of agronomic management to sustainably intensify Egypt's wheat production” authored by Ahmed et al., is a survey-based study to improve wheat production in Egypt. The author tried to find out a probable solution for wheat production improvement through approaches to ensure food security. The reviewer gone through the manuscript and found that the manuscript is presented as per journal guidelines, the contents of the manuscript are in defined format, and tables and figures are presented appropriately. The followings are the query and suggestions for improving the quality of the manuscript-

1.      Concise and modify the abstract for more result centric

2.      Replace “agriculture-based” with “agricultural”

3.      Give data source for “However, 97% of the Egyptian land is desert. Out of the total land area of about 100 million hectares (ha), Egypt has a cultivated land area of only 3.6 million hectares (ha), of which approximately 2.7 million hectares (ha) are concentrated in and around the Nile Delta”

4.      Rewrite "To avoid bread shortages and social unrest due to bread price spikes, Egypt’s … by increasing domestic production” for better clarity

5.      Replace “large and growing” with “increasing”

6.      The introduction section is written nicely but citations can be improved

7.      Shift the sentence “About 57% of the wheat-producing land in Egypt is located in the Nile Delta [12].” In the introduction section or modify it for better suitability

8.      The methods section is properly prepared and presented

9.      Figure 1 is ok

10.  Replace “Improved seeds” with “Improved varieties”

11.  The “average yield” is a more suitable term than “mean yield” so I would like to suggest to use “average yield” in “mean yield”

12.  Figure 2 is ok

13.  Modify section “3.3.1. Rotation crop” as  “3.3.1. Crop rotation”

14.  Table 1-7 are ok but the font is not similar to the manuscript text

15.  The result section is written and presented nicely

16.  The discussion section is written nicely and interpretations of results in the discussion are ok

17.  Modify the conclusion section for more soundness

 Overall, the manuscript is presented in a nice manner, the present study will also open a new avenue to improve wheat production in Egypt and will help in food and nutritional security. Therefore, the manuscript may be considered for publication but only after addressing the above queries.

Minor editing of the English language required

Author Response

Thank you for forwarding these helpful review reports. We are most grateful for
the time you spent providing suggestions on how to improve our paper. In our revision, we have tried to address your comments and suggestions as well as possible as specified in detail in the report.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Congratulations to the authors for producing an excellent analysis. It was very illuminating to read about farmer practices (especially the over-use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers) and I expect the results to be very informative for transitioning to a more sustainable wheat cultivating system in Egypt. I think the manuscript is written excellently, with concise and relevant Introduction and Discussion sections. I find the strategies outlined in the Discussion to be very interesting and think they are in line with the data presented in the Results. My specific comments are given below and relate to the Methods and Results sections.

In general, I think the manuscript would be improved by showing more of the data as figures. Much of the data is only discussed in the text or shown as numbers in tables, which is a shame as the data would be very interesting to explore in more detail as bar plots and other figures.

Methods:

Section 2.1:

"wheat basked" should be "wheat basket".

"Al Mahmoudiyah" point in figure 1 is quite difficult to see. Is it possible to add a lighter coloured outline to this point to make it easier to spot?

Section 2.2:

Is it possible to describe the official documents used for random sampling in greater detail (e.g. date of data collection, data collecting authority, etc...) without giving away sensitive personal data? For example, some newer farmers could have been missed during sampling depending on the age of these documents.

"the type (traditional vs. modern)" - Some more explanation about what "type" means here would be useful (I assume it means the type of wheat). It might also be helpful to explain how traditional vs. modern types were defined (e.g. are traditional types landraces, are modern types genotypes produced since 1950 in breeding programs, etc...).

Results:

Section 3.1:

A multi-panel plot of histograms showing the frequency of different agronomic practices could help to visualise the data.

"indicating that farmers with larger landholdings were able to produce greater amounts of wheat." Does this refer to greater production of wheat per hectare? Would be good to clarify if this is greater production per hectare.

"productivity" - is this referring to wheat yield per hectare?

Were there any farmers growing spring wheat or was it only winter wheat?

Are there any tables/figures that can be shown regarding the data on farmer age, land holding size, labour composition (family/neighbours/employees), and the other farmer attributes that were measured? (e.g. histograms, tables, etc...)

I would suggest using the term "middle-aged" instead of "rather old".

Section 3.3:

A multi-panel plot of relationships between wheat yield and the individual agronomic variables might also be useful to visualise the data (e.g. the preceding summer crop vs. wheat yield data could be a good bar plot, with the confidence intervals shown and the letters showing differences in statistical significance). Bar-plots might be most appropriate for visualising these relationships with the confidence intervals.

Was there any data regarding disease control collected in this study (e.g. pesticides, herbicides, organic crop protection methods)?

Data availability:

I would encourage the authors to share their raw data/spreadsheets if they can (anonymised to protect any identities of course).

Other than these suggestions, I thought the manuscript was excellent.

The English language in this manuscript is of very high quality, with only a few minor typos throughout the text that require addressing. The writing style is clear and concise, so no major changes are required.

Author Response

Thank you for forwarding these helpful review reports. We are most grateful for
the time you spent providing suggestions on how to improve our paper. In our revision, we have tried to address your comments and suggestions as well as possible as specified in detail in the report.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx