The combined effects of pesticides and a lack of nutrition form a deadly one-two punch, new research from biologists at the University of California San Diego has shown for the first time.

According to a new study, almost 36 billion tons of soil is lost every year due to water, and deforestation and other changes in land use make the problem worse. The study also offers ideas on how agriculture can change to become a part of the solution from being part of the problem.

Farmers in the Northeast are adapting to longer growing seasons and warming climate conditions – but they may face spring-planting whiplash as they confront fields increasingly saturated with rain, according to a research paper published in the journal Climatic Change.

When cattle arrive at a slaughterhouse on a Friday but are held for processing until Monday, they have an increased incidence of producing tough, low-grade meat, new research shows.

“It can happen if there are too many cattle and there’s a backup, or if there’s a plant breakdown,” said Heather Bruce, an associate professor of carcass and meat science in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.

Chithra Karunakaran and Karen Tanino’s team developed a simple non-destructive method to screen hundreds of wheat leaf samples in a day, reducing the time and cost associated with traditional breeding programs to select varieties for drought tolerance. Their findings were published in the November issue of Physiologia Plantarum.

“Developing these types of tools better enables physiologists to complement breeding programs,” said Tanino, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Saskatchewan.

"Climate-smart” crop cultivation, characterized by a low greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint, low synthetic nitrogen consumption, and simultaneously high yields (Figure 1), is an approach in agriculture for implementing the Paris Agreement as part of mitigating climate change. The GHG footprint is an index used to indicate the climate change impact potential exerted by crop production. It is therefore crucial to accurately quantify the GHG footprints of crop cultivation systems. However, severe problems or drawbacks in the quantification of GHG footprints still exist, which has limited the applicability of the GHG footprint in crop cultivation.

Researchers have determined what could be considered a “Goldilocks” climate for rainfall use by plants: not too wet and not too dry. 

Agriculture is the economic engine that powers the Great Plains, the vast stretch of treeless prairie that covers parts of 10 states – and where the next drought can appear with little warning.

Now there’s a powerful new tool to help provide farmers and ranchers in the arid western United States critical early indications of oncoming droughts, and its name is EDDI.

About 40 percent of northern Malaysian Borneo’s carbon stocks exist in forests that are not designated for maximum protections, according to new remote sensing and satellite mapping from Carnegie’s Greg Asner and his colleagues.

Detailed global maps of key traits in higher plants have been made available for the first time, thanks to work led by researchers from the University of Minnesota’s (UMN) College of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS).