News by Subject Agriculture

Men and women value, access and use resources from the natural environment in distinct and different ways, a new study has shown.

To help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change, scientists need to provide recommendations of crop varieties suitable to farmers' marginal and heterogeneous environments. However, existing on-farm approaches are difficult to scale. A novel scalable method using crowdsourced citizen science was employed on 12,409 trial plots in Ethiopia, India and Nicaragua. The results showed the potential of crowdsourced citizen science to improve variety recommendations and help farmers respond to climate change.

Recent advances to address hunger through agricultural discovery will be highlighted at this year's annual meeting of the AAAS. Session speaker and University of Illinois professor Donald Ort will discuss the global food security challenge and a recent breakthrough in Science that boosted crop growth by 40 percent by creating a shortcut for a glitch that plagues most food crops.

A team of 12 researchers from 10 different states embarked on an academic journey designed to generate an effective guideline essential for research, policy, and marketing strategies for the strawberry industry across the country, and to enable the development of general and region-specific educational and production tools.

Photos play an important role when it comes to how agricultural products are seen by consumers. A team of scientists from the Universities of Bozen-Bolzano and Göttingen investigated how people perceive and evaluate photos of a pig in different stalls. The results were published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE.

Laminitis -- a complex, common and often devastating disease -- is the second biggest killer of domestic horses. Now a body of important research on it, from QUT and other organizations, has been compiled and shared online by the Equine Veterinary Journal for vets and others to access.