News by Subject Agriculture

Plant pathologists working at universities across 26 corn-producing states in the United States and in Ontario, Canada, compiled data about annual corn reductions caused by diseases. Estimated loss from each disease varied greatly by region.

American dairy consumers are often influenced by a variety of factors that can affect their buying habits. These factors include taste, preference, government information, cultural background, social media, and the news. In an article appearing in JDS Communications, researchers found that households that frequently bought food for children are interested in dairy as part of their diet and purchased larger quantities of fluid milk and more fluid milk with a higher fat content.

The innovation project watermelon and melon cultivation and physiology team of Zhengzhou Fruit Research Institute has made new progress in the metabolism regulation of sugar and organic acid in watermelon fruit.

A first-of-its-kind, international study of 107,000 children finds that higher temperatures are an equal or even greater contributor to child malnutrition than the traditional culprits of poverty, inadequate sanitation, and poor education. The 19-nation study is the largest investigation to date of the relationship between our changing climate and children's diet diversity. Of the six regions examined--in Asia, Africa, and Central and South America--five had significant reductions in diet diversity associated with higher temperatures.

A dramatic decline in pollinating insects threatens the global food supply, yet it's getting "vanishingly low levels of attention" in mainstream news, even compared to coverage of climate change. That's the conclusion of a study titled "No buzz for bees," published this week in a special issue of PNAS. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers analyzed nearly 25 million news items from six prominent U.S. and global news sources using the university's massive Global News Index.

Differences in nitrogen loss intensity between livestock and crops confirm the need for change.