Strawberries from Spain, tomatoes from the Netherlands, spices from Morocco and citrus fruits from Georgia - the globalisation of food production and food trading is posing new challenges for consumer health protection. The range of foods is getting bigger and their safety has to be guaranteed in increasingly more complex supply chains.

On July 22, 1847, a scouting party from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stood above the Great Salt Lake Valley in modern-day Utah; by 1870, more than 18,000 followers had colonized the valley and surrounding region, displacing Native American populations to establish dispersed farming communities. While historians continue to debate the drivers of this colonization event, a new study from the University of Utah proposes that agricultural productivity drove dispersal patterns in a process that led the current distribution of Utah populations today.

There are fewer fish in the sea – literally.

Consumer demand and inadequate scientific information has led to overharvesting, reducing fish species and fish stocks around the world.

In northern Montana, Doug and Anna Jones-Crabtree restore soil health while growing organic heirloom and specialty grains, pulse and oilseed crops on 4,700 acres. A thousand miles away in Central Minnesota, the Main Street Project sequesters carbon as it transforms 100 acres of bare ground to a permaculture farm alive with hazelnut trees and foraging chickens.

New research has identified genes that control vitamin E content in maize grain, a finding that could lead to improving the nutritional profile of this staple crop.

As eureka moments go, it didn’t entirely follow the script.

There was the flash of inspiration and a flush of excitement when a check of the literature showed that, yes, this could be the real deal.

After harvesting a corn or soybean crop, farmers may plant a cover crop for a variety of reasons—to reduce soil erosion and nutrient runoff, increase organic matter in the soil, and improve water quality. Now there’s another reason. University of Illinois research shows that migratory birds prefer to rest and refuel in fields with cover crops.

A researcher in the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (UCVM) is using genomic technology in the search for a drug to fight a parasite that costs the cattle industry worldwide billions of dollars a year.

“One aspect of my research program is to develop new drugs to treat parasites of livestock and specifically helminths — parasitic roundworms — which cost the Canadian cattle industry an estimated $210 million a year,” says James Wasmuth, associate professor of host-parasite interactions at UCVM. “This is in lost production as well as treatment. The cost in the U.S. is around $2 billion, and in Brazil it’s a $7 billion-a-year problem for their beef industry.”

In the past decades, large areas of forest in Sumatra, Indonesia have been replaced by cash crops like oil palm and rubber plantations. New research, published in the European Geosciences Union journal Biogeosciences, shows that these changes in land use increase temperatures in the region. The added warming could affect plants and animals and make parts of the country more vulnerable to wildfires.

For the first time, evidence of the zebra chip pathogen has been found in potato fields in southern Alberta, but the University of Lethbridge’s Dr. Dan Johnson cautions against panic.

“So far, the zebra chip pathogen has appeared in only small numbers of potato psyllids,” says Johnson, a biogeography professor and coordinator of the Canadian Potato Psyllid and Zebra Chip Monitoring Network. “The number of potato psyllids in all Alberta sites is very low and many sample cards have found no evidence of the potato psyllid insect. Zebra chip does not normally become a problem unless the potato psyllids are found in much higher numbers than are currently being found in Canada.”