Feature Channels: Agriculture

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A now patented animal feed technology improves the health, growth and reproductive functions of livestock.

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An international team of scientists use advanced space-borne radar to reveal how water flowed through the Sinai Desert five to ten thousand years ago, opening the possibility of capturing water from seasonal downpours for sustainable agriculture.

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What if you could save farmers money, protect the quality of the water in a watershed, help keep invasive plants out of waterways, protect biodiversity and prevent potential oxygen-depletion mass fish kills all with one predictive tool?

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University of Arkansas researchers conducted a life-cycle analysis of fluid milk that will provide guidance for producers, processors and others throughout the dairy supply chain.

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A University of Florida scientist is part of team working toward an insecticide that would target malaria-carrying mosquitoes but do no harm to other organisms.

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A pioneering genomics technique developed at Cornell University to improve corn can now be used to improve the quality of milk and meat, according to research published May 17 in the online journal PLOS ONE.

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A resistant strain of wheat can reduce nematode numbers in the soil and protect the next rotation of tomato plants.

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The Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in Bowman v. Monsanto holds that farmers who lawfully obtain Monsanto’s patented, genetically modified soybeans do not have a right to plant those soybeans and grow a new crop of soybeans without Monsanto’s permission. “The Court closed a potential loophole in Monsanto’s long-standing business model, prevents Monsanto’s customers from setting up ‘farm-factories’ for producing soybeans that could be sold in competition with Monsanto’s soybeans, and it enables Monsanto to continue to earn a reasonable profit on its patented technology,” says Kevin Collins, JD, patent law expert and professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis

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Less oxygen = shorter time between molts = shorter life-span = fewer hungry grasshoppers. And for farmers, that’s very good news. A recent study conducted by Scott Kirkton, associate professor of biology at Union College, offers insight into the relationship between respiratory function and molting that could help farmers save more of their crops.

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Chickens likely raised with arsenic-based drugs result in chicken meat that has higher levels of inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen, according to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Harsh Bais and Janine Sherrier of the University of Delaware’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences are studying whether a naturally occurring soil bacterium, referred to as UD1023 because it was first characterized at the University, can create an iron barrier in rice roots that reduces arsenic uptake.

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North America isn’t known as a hotspot for crop plant diversity, yet a new inventory has uncovered nearly 4,600 wild relatives of crop plants in the United States, including close relatives of globally important food crops such as sunflower, bean, sweet potato, and strawberry.

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In a Kansas study, 50 years of inorganic fertilization increased soil organic carbon stocks but failed to enhance soil aggregate stability—a key indicator of soil structural quality that helps dictate how water moves through soil and the soil’s resistance to erosion.

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Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, is an expert on issues affecting immigrant labor. An advisor to the White House, Dudley comments on renewed efforts in Congress to pass comprehensive immigration law reform.

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Urban heat islands raise the temperature of residential lawns, and hotter temperatures lead to more carbon dioxide efflux as compared to agricultural corn fields.

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The area of the contiguous United States in moderate drought or worse fell below 50 percent for the first time since last June, according to the latest edition of the U.S. Drought Monitor.