Feature Channels: Agriculture

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To avoid salt in soil, plants can change their root direction and grow away from saline areas.

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Soils with high concentrations of microplastics could experience limited water flow

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In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits – yet this still saved over 55,000 tonnes of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.

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Researchers found a much faster way to screen soil bacteria as potential biostimulants and bio-pesticides.

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RUDN biologists have shown the effectiveness of nano-fertilizers, solutions with metal-based nanoparticles necessary for plant growth. Unlike traditional fertilizers, they are easily absorbed by plants and do not pollute the environment.

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RUDN University researchers have shown that technogenic toxicants in the ecosystem are distributed unevenly. The reason for this is that they come from the source in “portions”. Further, an active interaction of technogenic and natural factors begins: soils temporarily deposit pollution and create conditions for the transformation of toxicants. Further, the buffer role of the roots is switched on, which do not allow some pollutants to pass through. From a practical point of view, these data are important for optimizing the traffic load in urban ecosystems and developing technologies for cleaning soils in the city.

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A RUDN University biologist with colleagues from Egypt studied in detail the energy consumption of farms where vegetables are grown. The authors studied all the parameters that directly or indirectly contribute to global warming and named the safest crop from this point of view.

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California’s commercial orchards are home to nearly 2.5 million acres of almonds, walnuts, stone fruit and similar crops.

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A new grant from the National Institutes of Health to the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University will fund the collaborative development of community-based programs to increase local production and consumption of fruits and vegetables in the Mississippi Delta.

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Plastic sheets coated with an Eu3+ film that converts UV light to red light were able to accelerate growth of vegetal plants and trees.

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Ideas that sprang from a pre-pandemic panel discussion at Cornell University now inform a United Nations initiative aimed to meet looming global food needs in a healthy, equitable and sustainable way.

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A team of researchers has sequenced the Honeycrisp apple genome, a boon for scientists and breeders working with this popular and economically important cultivar.

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Cool-season grasses are often used as forage for beef cattle in the eastern United States, but these grasses don’t do well during the summer. Can warm-season grasses be an alternative?

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One of the reasons for the global threat to biodiversity is that we humans introduce more nutrients into our environment than would naturally be present there, for example, when fertilising agricultural land.

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The soil used for crops provides more than a space to grow.

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A new online bushfire resource – Recovering After a Farm Fire – is hoping to provide Aussie farmers with the support and information they need to help them process and recover after a bushfire.

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The latest articles that have been added to the Environmental Health channel.

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Symposium will feature presentations about modeling and coordinating soil moisture information in the United States

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After Canadian cities upgraded their wastewater treatment plans, the amount of damaging nutrients released into rivers plummeted. The result: a major improvement in river health.

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Symposium will feature presentations about studies in the south, west, north and Pacific Northwest regarding land management and farming

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Despite improvements by meatpackers to keep their supply chains free of cattle grazed on protected or illegally deforested lands, many slaughterhouses in Brazil — the world's top beef exporter — continue to purchase illegally pastured animals on a large scale. A new study published Oct. 18 in the journal Conservation Letters underscores the depth of the problem.

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Start-ups and academic labs have begun to produce cultivated meat grown from cells to replicate lamb, pork, fish and chicken. Now they are joining together in a Consortium hosted by Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture to identify and address the technological challenges in large scale production

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Join federal scientists as they share the latest nutrition research on Dietary Added Sugars, Complex Carbohydrates, Botanicals and Flavonoids.

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Modern agriculture uses a lot of plastic, especially in the form of mulch film that farmers use to cover field soils. This keeps the soils moist for crops, suppresses weeds and promotes crop growth.

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If Russia's war in Ukraine significantly reduces grain exports, surging prices could worsen food insecurity, with increases up to 4.6% for corn and 7.2% for wheat. That also would have an environmental impact, with carbon emissions rising as additional land is used to grow crops.

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Symposium will present information that will inform decision makers to support safe urban food production, treatment of urban pollutants, protection of water resources, improvement of environmental health, and human well-being

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Field experiments finds that tillers improve corn’s resilience to environmental conditions in Argentina without negatively impacting yield

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Developing countries around the globe face a challenge that pits economic growth against environmental protection. As they expand their agricultural production, they often convert forest into cropland and pasture. But the large-scale removal of trees weakens the world’s ability to prevent further climate deterioration and biodiversity loss.

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A researcher at the Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University has come up with the idea of producing 100% Made-in-Thailand cat litter from cassava and aims to export it to the global market. The product effectively absorbs liquids and odors of cat urine, decomposes naturally, and is safe for cats and their owners. Coming up is sand for cat litter that indicates disease.

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Symposium will feature industry economists and market specialists, crop commodity representatives, and university soil fertility and nutrient-management specialists

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Nitrous oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. Its global warming potential can be up to 300 times that of CO2 over a 100-year period. Globally, more than half of man-made nitrogen oxide emissions come from agriculture. A reduction in the nitrogen fertilizer used and an improvement in the nitrogen use efficiency of crops are therefore important measures in climate protection. An international team, coordinated by the Vienna Metabolomics Center (VIME) of the University of Vienna, is now presenting a new concept in the scientific journal "Trends in Plant Science" with which the efficiency of nitrogen fertilization is increased and the emission of nitrogen oxide (N2O) reduced.

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Growing nutritious, protein-dense microalgae in onshore, seawater-fed aquaculture systems — particularly along the coasts of the Global South — could help increase food production by more than 50% and feed a projected 10 billion people by 2050.

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Scientists are ringing alarm bells about a significant new threat to U.S. water quality: as winters warm due to climate change, they are unleashing large amounts of nutrient pollution into lakes, rivers, and streams. The first-of-its-kind national study finds that previously frozen winter nutrient pollution—unlocked by rising winter temperatures and rainfall—is putting water quality at risk in 40% of the contiguous U.S., including over 40 states.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science has selected Brookhaven National Laboratory to lead a new research effort focused on potential threats to crops grown for bioenergy production. Understanding how such bioenergy crops could be harmed by known or new pests or pathogens could help speed the development of rapid responses to mitigate damage and longer-term strategies for preventing such harm.

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Pennycress serves as viable alternative to traditional cover crops

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Symposium features the latest techniques and science on water optimization priorities and methods in various areas of the United States

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Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)-led teams earned Gold and Silver Innovation Awards for seaweed solutions projects, presented at the first annual Seagriculture Conference USA 2022 in Portland, Maine.

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Principal Investigator, Andrea Eveland, Ph.D., associate member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, will lead a multi-institutional project to deepen the understanding of sorghum, a versatile bioenergy crop, and its response to drought.

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New germplasm lines fight off fungus and have good fiber quality

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Symposium to cover biological and physical ways to increase carbon in soil

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Krishna Jagadish leads a team of researchers looking to improve grain sorghum.

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An Iowa State University research team is part of an $80 million federal grant to show how generating renewable natural gas from cover crops and prairie grass could give farmers a market-based motivation to use conservation practices that sequester carbon dioxide and improve water quality.

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The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture is awarding more than $1.8 million to the Agricultural Genome to Phenome Initiative led by Iowa State University, which aims to foster research collaborations to improve the long-term efficiency and resilience of U.S. agriculture.