Farming and Agriculture

Researchers from the Institute of Applied Ecology (IAE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have uncovered how soil food webs promote the transformation and storage of photosynthetic carbon in farmlands. Their results were published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.... Read more

Whether you're a home gardener or an industrial farmer, you might be familiar with mulching films—plastic sheets laid over the soil to protect seedlings and promote crop growth. But like many other plastic materials, these films can release damaging microplastics and don't have any insect-repelling power. So, a team reporting... Read more

Higher yields, greater resilience to climatic changes or diseases—the demands on crop plants are constantly growing. To address these challenges, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are developing new methods in genetic engineering.... Read more

The reed leafhopper (Pentastiridius leporinus) was originally a specialist, limited exclusively to reed grass as a food source. Within a few years, however, it developed into a dangerous pest that attacks not only reed grass but also sugar beets, potatoes, carrots, and onions.... Read more

One of the great mysteries in plant biology is how, given the clouds of pollen released by dozens of plant species all at the same time, an individual plant can recognize which particular species' pollen grains will induce fertility and which to reject. We are now one step closer to... Read more

Cornell researchers have discovered a previously unknown way plants regulate water that is so fundamental it may change plant biology textbooks—and open the door to breeding more drought-tolerant crops.... Read more

Researchers at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), working in close collaboration with KeyGene, have developed a method that enables plant cells to regenerate into complete plants without the need for added hormones.... Read more

A new study published in People and Nature by the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) and the Landscape Conservation Association Northwest Saxony shows that whether farmers participate in EU-funded measures for biodiversity conservation strongly depends on their personal contacts.... Read more

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have reconstructed the distribution history of black pepper over the past 21,000 years in an international study. Using a new approach, they discovered, among other things, that the plant migrated too slowly after the last ice age... Read more

A team led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has engineered poplar trees to produce valuable chemicals that can be used to make biodegradable plastics and other products. The modified trees were more tolerant of high salt levels in soil and were easier to... Read more

A new system could overhaul maps that misclassify hundreds of thousands of smallholder coffee and cacao farmers as working in forests. Without better maps, deforestation regulations could ripple through markets from remote farms to a caffe mocha near you.... Read more

Pecans, America's only native major nut, have a storied history in the United States. Today, American trees produce hundreds of millions of pounds of pecans—80% of the world's pecan crop. Most of that crop stays here. Pecans are used to produce pecan milk, butter and oil, but many of the... Read more

Agricultural producers and manufacturers often need information about crop attributes, from nutrient content to chemical composition, to make management decisions. In recent years, multispectral imaging has emerged as a useful tool for product analysis, but the required equipment is expensive. Standard RGB cameras are much more affordable, but their images... Read more

UC Davis nematologists, including Valerie Williamson, professor emerita in the Department of Plant Pathology, and associate professor Shahid Siddique, Department of Entomology and Nematology, have long wondered how a plant-parasitic nematode, the Northern root-knot nematode, is able to infect such a wide range of organisms, from monocots and dicots to... Read more

As of 2022 alone, Filipinos were eating 2.3 million metric tons more rice than the country produced—an 18% shortfall that has locked the Philippines into deeper dependence on imported rice despite years of government programs to boost local harvests.... Read more