World breakthrough on salt-tolerant wheat

Salt-tolerant durum wheat grown in northern New South Wales as part of a field trial.
Photo by CSIRO.A team of Australian scientists involving the University of Adelaide has bred salt tolerance into a variety of durum wheat that shows improved grain yield by 25% on salty soils.

Using 'non-GM' crop breeding techniques, scientists from CSIRO Plant Industry have introduced a salt-tolerant gene into a commercial durum wheat, with spectacular results shown in field tests. Researchers at the University of Adelaide's Waite Research Institute have led the effort to understand how the gene delivers salinity tolerance to the plants.

Organic Foods Reduce Environmental Risks

Credit: Rob Owen-WahlThe US President's Cancer Panel Report released today exhorts consumers to choose food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, and growth hormones to help decrease their exposure to environmental chemicals that can increase their risk of contracting cancer. Organic products avoid the use of these chemicals.

"Exposure to pesticides can be decreased by choosing, to the extent possible, food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers... Similarly, exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones, and toxic run-off from livestock feed lots can be minimized by eating free-range meat raised without these medications," according to the landmark report, "Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now," submitted to President Obama by Dr. LaSalle Leffall, Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret L. Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Proteins in unroasted coffee beans may become next-generation insecticides

Unroasted coffee beans contain proteins that kill insects, a finding that may lead to new insecticides for protecting food crops.
Credit: Fernando Rebelo, Wikimedia CommonsScientists in Brazil are reporting for the first time that coffee beans contain proteins that can kill insects and might be developed into new insecticides for protecting food crops against destructive pests. Their study, which suggests a new use for one of the most important tropical crops in the world, appears in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.

Innovative thinking on agriculture in the Greater Mekong Subregion

Nations of the Greater Mekong Subregion need to 'rethink' their agricultural industries to meet future food needs, given the social shifts and climate changes that are forecast for the coming decades. With better farming practices, and by managing agriculture within the wider context of natural ecosystems, nations could boost production and increase the wealth and resilience of poor people in rural communities. Demand for food is forecast to double by 2050, as populations swell and people's dietary choices change. If governments act now, they will be better placed to meet this target and withstand the more severe climatic changes likely to affect the GMS beyond 2050.

Evidence of increasing antibiotic resistance

A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are reporting disturbing evidence that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years.

Surprisingly, this trend continues despite apparent more stringent rules on use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, and improved sewage treatment technology that broadly improves water quality in surrounding environments. Their report appears in ACS' bi-weekly journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Food Dictatorship Vs. Food Democracy

Dr Vandana Shiva. Photo Credit: Documentary.orgAn International conference on “Two Decades of the GMO Free Movement” was organized by Navdanya / Research Foundation for Science, Technology & Ecology in association with the International Commission on the Future of Food, ARSIA, Region of Tuscany, Italy, Center for Food Safety, USA, Save Our Seeds, Germany, Diverse Women for Diversity and Initiative for Health, Equity and Society on February 23, 2010 at India International Centre.

Ever since giant corporations like Monsanto started to commercialize GMO crops and foods, citizens and governments across the world have organized to keep their food and agriculture GMO free.

Roots key to second Green Revolution

Root systems are the basis of the second Green Revolution, and the focus on beans and corn that thrive in poor growing conditions will help some of the world's poorest farmers, according to a Penn State plant scientist.

"Africans missed the Green Revolution of the '60s because they typically do not eat wheat and rice, which was its focus," said Jonathan Lynch, professor of plant nutrition.

Fungal fumes clear out crop pests

A cocktail of compounds emitted by the beneficial fungus Muscodor albus may offer a biologically based way to fumigate certain crops and rid them of destructive pests. That’s the indication from Agricultural Research Service (ARS) studies in which scientists pitted Muscodor against potato tuber moths, apple codling moths and Tilletia fungi that cause bunt diseases in wheat. The scientists—at ARS laboratories in Aberdeen, Idaho; Wapato, Wash., and other locations—conducted separate studies of Muscodor. However, their goal was the same: to learn whether volatile organic compounds (VOCs) released by the fungus could replace or diminish the use of synthetic pesticides.

In field trials conducted since 2007, ARS plant pathologist Blair Goates found that treating wheat seed or the soil with a formulation of Muscodor and ground rye completely prevented common bunt under moderate disease conditions. Caused by the fungus T. tritici, common bunt reduces wheat yields and grain quality.

Plant buffers may limit spread of antibiotics in animal waste

This photo shows buffer strips of grass and trees adjacent to cornfields at MU Greenley Center | Credit: Kristen VeumResearch by scientists at the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry suggests that buffer strips of grasses and other plants can trap and break down veterinary antibiotics in manure fertilizers.

Buffer strips have already demonstrated that they can be effective in protecting water quality, controlling erosion and supporting wildlife around crop fields.

Pesticides most important barrier for the recovery of biodiversity on farmland

Since the early nineties the EU has implemented policies to reduce the dramatic negative effects of the use of pesticides on farmland. Nevertheless, a Europe wide study showed that insecticides and fungicides still had major negative effects on wild plant and animal species on arable farms.

The Nature Conservation and Plant Ecology Group of Wageningen University, part of Wageningen UR - together with eight other universities in West and Eastern Europe - investigated the effects of intensive farming on wild plant and animal species and the potential for biological pest control.

Solar-powered irrigation systems improve diet and income in rural sub-Saharan Africa

The crops on this small farm in rural Benin are watered by a solar-powered drip irrigation system. Photo: Marshall BurkeSun-powered pumps installed in remote villages in Benin provide a cost-effective way of delivering irrigation water, particularly during the long dry season.

Solar-powered drip irrigation systems significantly enhance household incomes and nutritional intake of villagers in arid sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new Stanford University study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study found that solar-powered pumps installed in remote villages in the West African nation of Benin provide a cost-effective way of delivering much-needed irrigation water, particularly during the long dry season. The results are scheduled to be published the week of Jan. 4 in the online edition of PNAS.

Sunflower genome holds the promise of sustainable agriculture

As agricultural land becomes increasingly valuable, the need to maximize its utilization increases and decisions about what crops to plant and where, become paramount.

The sunflower family includes a number of valuable food crops, with sunflower seed production alone valued at about $14 billion annually. Yet the sunflower family is the only one of a handful of economically important plant families where a reference genome is not available to enable the breeding of crops better suited to their growing environment or consumers tastes.

Miscanthus, a biofuels crop, can host western corn rootworm

Adult rootworms feed on corn silks, while their larvae attack the roots. Photo by Joseph Spencer, INHS. The western corn rootworm beetle, a pest that feasts on corn roots and corn silk and costs growers more than $1 billion annually in the U.S., also can survive on the perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus, a potential biofuels crop that would likely be grown alongside corn, researchers report.

Rootworm beetle larvae can survive to adulthood on Miscanthus rhizomes, and adult beetles will lay their eggs at the base of Miscanthus plants grown near cornfields, the researchers found. Their study, in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, is the first to identify Miscanthus as a host of the corn rootworm.

Solar-powered irrigation significantly improves diet and income in rural sub-Saharan Africa

Solar-powered drip irrigation systems significantly enhance household incomes and nutritional intake of villagers in arid sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new Stanford University study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The two-year study found that solar-powered pumps installed in remote villages in the West African nation of Benin were a cost-effective way of delivering much-needed irrigation water, particularly during the long dry season. The results are published in the Jan. 4, 2010, online edition of PNAS.

"Significant fractions of sub-Saharan Africa's population are considered food insecure," wrote lead author Jennifer Burney, a postdoctoral scholar with the Program on Food Security and the Environment and the Department of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford. "Across the region, these food-insecure populations are predominantly rural, they frequently survive on less than $1 per person per day, and whereas most are engaged in agricultural production as their main livelihood, they still spend 50 to 80 percent of their income on food, and are often net consumers of food."

Lost water of the Napa Valley vineyards

Stanford researchers on how irrigation water slips away and how to stanch the flow

Getting the most out of every drop of water is a high priority for grape growers in the southern Napa Valley, where summers are hot and dry and vines have to be irrigated to make it through the growing season. But Stanford researchers have found that a significant portion of the water applied to the vines zips right by the plants, hardly even pausing.

Antagonistic genes control rice growth

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution, with colleagues, have found that a plant steroid prompts two genes to battle each other – one suppresses the other to ensure that leaves grow normally in rice and the experimental plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a relative of mustard. The results, published in the December 15, 2009, issue of The Plant Cell, have important implications for understanding how to manipulate crop growth and yield.

In plants, steroid levels reflect environmental and internal signals and control many processes. Steroid hormones called brassinosteroids (BRs) start their action on the surface of the cell and, through a molecular relay, send signals into the cell's nucleus to turn on or off specific genes, particularly those that are critical to regulating plant growth and development.

Protecting unique wild coffee forests in Ethiopia

Photo:Charlesfres/Flickr/BirdLifeNABU (BirdLife in Germany), in cooperation with the Ethiopian Government and other partners, will run a special project to protect the last natural forests where the world famous 'arabica' coffee is produced. In the last 10 years, almost 43 per cent of these forests have disappeared, as they have been transformed into arable land, causing a huge loss of biodiversity.

"The clearing of tropical forests is a major source of greenhouse gases. Over the past 40 years, 35 per cent of Ethiopian forests have been lost through deforestation. If we do not act now, Ethiopia will lose all its forests by 2020"

Illegally cultivated strawberries begin to fail the supermarket sustainability test

Legal and efficient use of water and land are among the criteria being applied by some of Europe's leading retailers in sourcing strawberry suppliers from around the beleaguered Doñana National Park in southern Spain, WWF warned.

WWF is hoping that the pressure from retailers will help ease some of the problems of strawberry farm encroachment and interception of water supplies around the national park, while waiting on a long promised management plan from Andalusian authorities.

Precision breeding creates super potato

These are potatoes which exclusively contain amylopectin starch.Photo: Fraunhofer IMEThe fall of 2009 was a truly special season for the Emsland Group: For the first time in the history of the largest German potato starch manufacturer, it processed Tilling potatoes, which exclusively contain amylopectin starch.

Not only can nutritional starches for emulsifying soups and desserts be extracted from it – it can also be used for paste and smooth coating for paper and thread production. "This potato is the first product in Germany developed by Tilling that achieves market readiness," explains Prof. Prüfer of the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME.

A modernised methodology for obtaining new varieties of potato

Research into the potato tuber at the Basque Institute for Agricultural Research and Development and at the NEIKER-Tecnalia Technology Centre has, in recent years, focused on the development of new varieties of potato adapted to Spanish agro-climatic conditions.

The Basque technology centre has updated the traditional system for improving strains of the tuber by involving novel techniques that enable obtaining new varieties that are the most resistant, productive and apt for both fresh consumption and for industrial processing. In 2009 three new varieties have been inscribed in the Spanish Office for Plant Varieties, the Basque names of which are Leire, Mirari y Harana.