Cassava is a staple in the diet of more than one billion people across 105 countries, yet this “orphaned crop” has received little attention compared to popular crops like corn and soybeans. While advances in breeding have helped cassava withstand pests and diseases, cassava yields no more today than it did in 1963. Corn yields, by comparison, have more than doubled.

Mixed forests are more productive than monocultures. This is true on all five continents, and particularly in regions with high precipitation. These findings from an international overview study, in which the Technical University of Munich (TUM) participated, are highly relevant for forest science and forest management on a global scale.

New University of British Columbia research finds that the success of weedy and invasive plants like the Jerusalem artichoke lies in their genes.

Farmers and insurance companies may soon get more accurate estimates of weather-related crop damage thanks to a University of Alberta researcher working with existing drone technology.

It’s playtime for piglets at the Prairie Swine Centre (PSC), where Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) researcher Dr. Yolande Seddon hopes to find out whether piglets that play are better able to cope with life’s stresses.

A new aeroponic garden in the University of Coloardo (Boulder) Village Center Dining and Community Commons is the first in the nation to provide students, staff and faculty with fresh salad greens grown on site in a high-tech greenhouse attached to a dining hall.

Plants are responding in unexpected ways to increased carbon dioxide in the air, according to a twenty-year study conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota and published in the journal Science. For the first 12 years, researchers found what they expected regarding how different types of grasses reacted to carbon dioxide. However, researchers’ findings took an unanticipated turn during the last eight years of the study.

Instead of waking up before dawn to milk cows manually, many dairy farmers now use robots to milk — and those robots do more than just milk cows. They can also provide valuable information about the animals’ overall health.

China’s croplands have experienced drastic changes in management practices related to fertilization, tillage and residue treatment since the 1980s. The impact of these changes on soil organic carbon (SOC) has drawn major attention from the scientific community and decision-makers because changes in SOC may not only affect future food production but also water and soil quality, as well as greenhouse gas emissions.  

When European researchers recently announced a new technique that could potentially replace chemical pesticides with a natural “vaccine” for crops, it sounded too good to be true. Too good partly because agriculture is complicated, and novel technologies that sound brilliant in the laboratory often fail to deliver in the field. And too good because agriculture’s “Green Revolution” faith in fertilizers, fungicides, herbicides, and other agribusiness inputs has proved largely unshakable up to now, regardless of the effects on public health or the environment.