The Organic Field Crop Production and Marketing Meeting will be hosted at the Vegetable Research Station near Kibler, Arkansas, on April 7 to connect grain farmers with organic market opportunities and to showcase ongoing organic research in the state. The event, which is free and open to the public, is focused on connecting growers interested in exploring organic production with buyers from the region to discuss market opportunities for organic grain crops. The organic field day also involves partners from the USDA’s Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative project, as well as the Natural Soybean and Grain Alliance, the Center for Arkansas Farms and Food, Winrock International, the Rodale Institute, and University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture researchers.

To help meet the rising national and global demand for poultry products, the Center for Scalable and Intelligent Automation in Poultry Processing will hold its first field day on April 9 from 12:30-5 p.m. at the Don Tyson Center for Agricultural Sciences in Fayetteville, Arkansas. This free event will share what researchers have learned so far about developing new robotic technologies, including tools for deboning, detecting foreign materials and pathogens, and using virtual reality to operate equipment remotely. The event will not be recorded or streamed online.

Nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) confers broad-spectrum resistance in plants, offering a simple, environmental-friendly, and promising strategy for safeguarding crops against diverse phytopathogens. These findings also provide valuable insights for future in-depth studies into the functional mechanisms of NMN.

A newly identified disease affecting corn and sorghum can closely resemble iron deficiency, potentially leading farmers to apply costly nutrient treatments that do not address the underlying problem. New research published in Plant Health Progress documents the discovery and identification of a bacterial pathogen responsible for the symptoms.

Two researchers at the University of Zurich have discovered and described a new, previously unknown palm species found in the virgin forests of Colombia. In close cooperation with an indigenous community there, they mapped the geographical distribution of the palm species and subjected their study to a local peer review process.

A new interdisciplinary study published in Nature reconstructs over 2,000 years of population history in Argentina’s Uspallata Valley (UV), a southern frontier of Andean farming spread in ancient times, with broader lessons on how agriculture shaped societies and how communities endured crises. By combining ancient human and pathogen genomics with isotopic analyses, archaeology and paleoclimate records–and working in close collaboration with Huarpe Indigenous communities–, the research reveals how local hunter-gatherers adopted agriculture, how more recent intensive maize farmers experienced prolonged stress, and how kinship-based mobility may have helped communities persist through instability.