Producers sometimes face challenges that go deep into the soil. They need answers to help the soil, on site. A portable field sensor can accurately measure minerals in soils more easily and efficiently than existing methods. And a research team, including a middle school student and her scientist father, can confirm it.

Petroleum-derived chemicals are intrinsic to virtually every product in today’s society, from the medicines we take to the agrochemicals that produce our food and the plastics that encase our mobile devices. As pressure mounts to reduce the world’s fossil fuel consumption, developing greener manufacturing processes that use less energy and produce less waste is becoming increasingly urgent.

The DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Palaeoscience funded researchers based in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies and in the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand have used fossil pollen records to solve an on-going debate regarding invasive plant species in eastern Lesotho.

Many images of rural America are food-related—a freshly-baked apple pie cooling on the windowsill, a roadside produce stand brimming with sweet corn and tomatoes, or a Norman Rockwell print showing a family sitting down to dinner. But the reality is that many people in rural America face hunger and don’t always know where their next meal is coming from.

Biochar from recycled waste may both enhance crop growth and save health costs by helping clear the air of pollutants, according to Rice University researchers.

Relocating coffee areas, along with forestation and forest conservation, to higher altitudes to cope with climate change could increase Ethiopia‘s coffee farming area fourfold, a study predicts.

It might seem like a tomato plant and a subway system don’t have much in common, but both, it turns out, are networks that strive to make similar tradeoffs between cost and performance.

Using 3D laser scans of growing plants, Salk scientists found that the same universal design principles that humans use to engineer networks like subways also guide the shapes of plant branching architectures. The work, which appears in the July 26, 2017, issue of Cell Systems, could help direct strategies to increase crop yields or breed plants better adapted to climate change.

Tiny eel-like creatures called nematodes are surrounding us. While they can be free-living (a cup of soil or seawater contains thousands), the most well-known nematodes are the parasitic kind that wreak havoc in people, animals and plants.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found a specific gene in corn that appears to be associated with resistance to two and possibly three different plant leaf diseases.

A University of Toronto startup that sells vertical hydroponic growing systems has joined forces with a Ryerson University-linked non-profit to bring down the stratospheric cost of fresh fruits and vegetables in Canada’s northernmost communities.

The unique partnership was forged at this year’s OCE innovation conference after Conner Tidd, a co-founder of U of T’s Just Vertical, ran into the founders of Ryerson’s Growing North. Tidd knew Growing North had built a geodesic greenhouse filled with hydroponic towers in Naujaat, NV.