News by Subject Agriculture

Substantial reductions in a deadly root disease of wheat crops and corresponding increases in yields of grain and straw mark a significant advance in the continuing war to protect the staple cereal from the ravages of the take-all soil pathogen. Researchers have now shown that careful selection of the variety of the first wheat in a new cropping cycle can reduce the disease's severity and increase yields in the second crop variety.

As the world's population swells, humans will have to figure out how to keep feeding livestock without using even larger tracts of land to grow food for them or causing more harm to the environment. Scientists report in a study appearing in Environmental Science & Technology that the key could be bacteria that can efficiently produce large amounts of microbial proteins. These proteins could replace some of the crops grown today to feed animals.

Researchers have learned that a specific wavelength range of blue fluorescent light set bees abuzz.

Plants could be genetically rewired to better resist disease, helping safeguard crop yields worldwide according to new research by the universities of Warwick and York. Defensive feedback control system developed enables plants to strengthen their defenses to withstand attack by re-wiring existing gene connections The system uses same approach as aircraft autopilots use to counteract turbulence.

The size of farms in China is a key contributor to the overuse of agricultural chemicals, and as a result they may be too small to be environmentally sustainable, a new study has found.

A new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says we are dramatically underestimating the role inland fisheries play in global food security.