U.S. lawns cover an area almost as large as Florida, making turfgrass our largest ‘crop’ and lawn fertilizer use a legitimate issue.
Strategies to rebuild the soil are essential to ensure that agricultural lands impacted by the floods are productive again.
In more than 50 on-farm demonstration projects, nitrogen application rates selected by crop sensors increased yield by almost 2 bushels per acre compared with farmer-chosen rates, while reducing by 25% the amount of excess nitrogen that was applied to fields but not removed in grain.
An international team of researchers led by investigators in the U.S. and Germany has shed light on the inner workings of the endocycle, a common cell cycle that fuels growth in plants, animals and some human tissues and is responsible for generating up to half of the Earth’s biomass. This discovery, led by a geneticist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and reported Oct. 30 in Nature, leads to a new understanding of how cells grow and how rates of cell growth might be increased or decreased, which has important implications in both agriculture and medicine.
Taking a cue from Mother Nature, researchers at DOE’s BioEnergy Science Center have undertaken a first-of-its-kind study of a naturally occurring phenomenon in trees to spur the development of more efficient bioenergy crops. Tension wood, which forms naturally in hardwood trees in response to bending stress, is known to possess unique features that render it desirable as a bioenergy feedstock.
California’s goal of 33% renewable energy by 2020 could receive a significant boost if the state built large-scale solar plants on degraded farmland. A new report explains how to expedite these projects, while protecting prime farmland and natural habitats.
Weeds have a greater impact on crop yields than any other pests. Over the past several decades, farmers have continually turned to synthetic herbicides because they are the most effective deterrent against weeds. However, demand for organic food is rising, and public sentiment toward synthetic herbicides is increasingly negative. There is a need—and a market—for new, natural weed management tools.
The creation of compounds that disrupt a worldwide pest's winter sleep hints at the potential to develop natural and targeted controls against crop-eating insects, new research suggests.
A new tool created by University of Arkansas researchers and their colleagues will help hog farmers increase productivity, decrease costs of production and minimize the environmental impact of swine production in the United States.
New book by Ryerson researchers explores creative approaches to urban food production.
In seeking to better understand how teosinte gave rise to corn, a scientific team has pinpointed one of the key genetic changes that paved the way for corn’s domestication.
Current durum wheat cultivars have no resistance to Fusarium head blight, but USDA researchers are searching for a solution to this widespread disease
A unique study shows the progress of soybean breeding for improved animal nutrition.
David W. Wolfe, professor of plant and soil ecology and co-author of the upcoming NYSERDA study focused on preparing New York for climate change, talks about the security of food, water and city subways at the next Inside Cornell media luncheon.
Preliminary research on Fusarium, a group of fungi that includes devastating pathogens of plants and animals, shows how these microbes travel through the air. Researchers at Virginia Tech now believe that with improvements on this preliminary research, there will be a better understanding about crop security, disease spread, and climate change.
A study in the Journal of Environmental Quality reports that total emissions of the greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, were not significantly affected by tillage practices when expressed on an area basis. When they were calculated per unit yield of grain, however, emissions were significantly greater under no-tillage compared with conventional tillage.
With citizens’ groups seeking government regulation of foul-smelling ammonia emissions from large dairy farms, scientists today reported that adding natural plant extracts to cow feed can reduce levels of the gas by one-third while reducing the need to fortify cow feed with expensive protein supplements. They reported here at the 242nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
In an analysis of 18 years of crop yield and farm management data from a long-term University of Minnesota trial, an organic crop rotation was consistently more profitable and carried less risk of low returns than conventional corn and soybean production, even when organic prime premiums were cut by half.
This fall, as Middle Tennessee State University’s School of Agribusiness and Agriscience begins a second century of educating undergraduate and graduate students, its dairy farm will undergo a ‘moo’-ving experience.
The increasingly prevalent notion that expensive organic fruits and vegetables are safer because pesticides — used to protect traditional crops from insects, thus ensuring high crop yields and making them less expensive — are a risk for causing cancer has no good scientific support, an authority on the disease said here today. Such unfounded fears could have the unanticipated consequence of keeping healthful fruits and vegetables from those with low incomes.
Billions of people owe their lives to nitrogen fertilizers — a pillar of the fabled Green Revolution in agriculture that averted global famine in the 20th century — but few are aware that nitrogen pollution from fertilizers and other sources has become a major environmental problem that threatens human health and welfare in multiple ways, a scientist said here today.
Globally, irrigation increases agricultural productivity by an amount roughly equivalent to the entire agricultural output of the U.S., according to a new University of Wisconsin-Madison study.
Twin-row soybean production is the preferred growing method for growers, but is it more productive than the conventional single-row method?
A new handbook for field scientists and other model users highlights the proper methods of model use.
Weed Technology presents (1) original research on weed/crop management systems, herbicides, weed resistance to herbicides, and weed biology; (2) reports of new weed problems, weed-related surveys, and new technologies for weed management; and (3) special articles emphasizing technology transfer to improve weed control. The journal is a publication of the Weed Science Society of America.
A global study by an international team including professor John Graves of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science quantifies the threat to tuna and billfish populations around the world.
A new research project at South Dakota State University looks at growing rye for biomass as part of a corn and soybean rotation.
South Dakota State University researchers Kuo-Liang "Matt" Chang and Soo Hyun Cho study the factors driving farm management decisions — including the crucial decision to pass the farm operation to a younger generation.
South Dakota State University aquaculture research shows soy can provide high-performance perch feed. SDSU professor Michael Brown’s latest work finds that some diets using soy protein concentrates, or SPC, perform as well as fishmeal-based diets.
Recent research offers new insight on the silage yield and quality responses of corn hybrids to seeding rates.
Several crops produced in the U.S. could play a significant role in biobased resins and coatings recently developed by researchers at North Dakota State University, Fargo. The NDSU researchers have developed a family of resins from renewable raw materials, creating resins that eliminate hazardous components such as formaldehyde and bisphenol-A. The resins are based on sucrose and vegetable oils, and can be varied to perform in many applications and industries.
New PNNL research explains how the carbon involved in crop production is unevenly distributed. More populated regions that depend on others to grow their food end up releasing the carbon that comes with those crops, leading those areas to become carbon sources.
Each year, plant diseases wipe out millions of tons of crops and waste valuable water resources. But a new discovery suggests that all pathogens attack plants via a surprisingly limited number of cellular targets. The finding could help researchers develop disease resistant crops and environmentally sustainable treatments for plant diseases.
Bacteria taken from a lake used to dump mine waste can help plants grow in soil contaminated by copper.
Two University of Illinois at Chicago biologists will canvass Chicago next summer to learn where in the city pollinating bees live and what habitat they require. The information may help urban farmers gain more bountiful yields.
South Dakota State University is partnering with animal health leader Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Inc. to develop a new technology to protect pigs against a deadly form of E. coli.
Rural landscapes of the future might have pyrolysis plants instead of grain elevators on every horizon —processing centers where farmers would bring bulky crops such as switchgrass to be made into bio-oil. New research looks at bio-oil and a potentially beneficial co-product called biochar.
Scientists study the effects of grazing management practices on sediment, phosphorus, and harmful bacteria deposits into pasture streams.
A Kansas State University geographer is part of a research team out to prove what environmental scientists have suspected for years: Increasing the production of soybean and biofuel crops in Brazil increases deforestation in the Amazon. Although this cause-and-effect finding seems fairly straightforward, the issue of deforestation in the Amazon is more complex and more devastating than previously believed.
Although beneficial, farmers are often hesitant to use cover crops because of costs, time
Although considered an environmentally sound disposal method, applying sewage sludge to agricultural lands may leave harmful metals in the soil.
Researchers utilize core collections of peanut genetics to solve agricultural problems for farmers around the world.
Weed Science is a journal of the Weed Science Society of America, a non-profit professional society that promotes research, education, and extension outreach activities related to weeds; provides science-based information to the public and policy makers; and fosters awareness of weeds and their impacts on managed and natural ecosystems.
Agricultural producers and waterfowl will benefit from a project at South Dakota State University that uses an innovative plant-breeding technique to shave perhaps two years off the time needed to produce winter wheat varieties for farmers in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America.
University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are part of an international consortium that has successfully sequenced and analyzed the potato genome. The consortium’s work, which is described in the current issue of Nature, turned up more than 39,000 genes and is expected to speed potato research and breeding projects around the globe.
Scientists develop model to assess the impact agroforestry windbreaks have on farming operations.
The prospect of rising temperatures in Iowa and the Midwest is predicted to lead to a dramatic decline in corn yield. With a $5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Iowa State University researchers Alan Myers and Tracie Hennen-Bierwagen are looking to develop a corn variety that maintains the region's high yields even as temperatures rise. The study is part of the response within the scientific community to challenges issued by the National Research Council in their report, "New Biology for the 21st Century: Ensuring the United States Lead the Coming Revolution."
The discovery that a bacterial species in the Australian Tammar wallaby gut is responsible for keeping the animal’s methane emissions relatively low suggests a potential new strategy may exist to try to reduce methane emissions from livestock, according to a new study.
Agroforestry management can improve yields and reduce environmental costs.
Scientists isolate single protein in potatoes responsible for an unhealthy compound produced when cooking at high temperatures.
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