FARM NEWS - BIOTECHNOLOGY DAILY

How improved valves let grasses 'breathe,' cope with climate change

Mar 17, 2017 (SPX)

New work from a joint team of plant biologists and ecologists from Carnegie and Stanford University has uncovered the factor behind an important innovation that...

Wild sunflowers provide resilient diversity

Mar 17, 2017 (SPX)

Beauty and utility in one bright package, sunflowers are one of just a few commercial crops with origins in the United States. Today, sunflowers are grown in mo...

Cocoa industry agrees plan to tackle deforestation

Mar 16, 2017 (AFP)

Major chocolate makers, including Ferrero, Nestle and Mars, agreed Thursday a landmark initiative to tackle deforestation in top cocoa producers Ivory Coast and...

Mar 15, 2017 (AFP)

The EU's chemicals agency said Wednesday that glyphosate, one of the world's most widely used weedkillers, should not be classed as a carcinogen. The assessment...

Microbes measure ecological restoration success

Mar 15, 2017 (SPX)

The success of ecological restoration projects around the world could be boosted using a potential new tool that monitors soil microbes. Published in the journa...

Greenhouse gases: First it was cows now it's larvae

Mar 15, 2017 (SPX)

Chaoborus spp is a small fly species that is found all over the world (except in Antarctica). The insect spends one to two years of its life cycle under water i...

This small molecule could have a big future in global food security

Mar 13, 2017 (SPX)

Researchers at the University of Arizona have found a promising way to prevent the loss of millions of tons of crops to a fungus each year, offering the potenti...

Researchers develop equation that helps to explain plant growth

Mar 09, 2017 (SPX)

It is rare in biology that a single trait can answer questions spanning several fields of research. One such trait is plant biology's "leaf mass per area," a si...

Future climate change will affect plants and soil differently

Mar 09, 2017 (SPX)

A new European study has found that soil carbon loss is more sensitive to climate change compared to carbon taken up by plants. In drier regions, soil carbon lo...

Stabilizing soils with sulfates to improve their constructional properties

Mar 09, 2017 (SPX)

The journal Applied Clay Science has recently published the paper 'Sulfate soils stabilization with magnesium-based bindersa', a piece of research led by Dr And...

Hand-picked specialty crops 'ripe' for precision agriculture techniques

Mar 06, 2017 (SPX)

Timing the harvest and transport of highly perishable, hand-picked crops such as strawberries so these delicate products reach consumers at peak flavor and fres...

Colombia's 'drug triangle' puts hope in chocolate

Mar 04, 2017 (AFP)

Isidro Montiel arrived in Colombia's lawless "drug triangle" in 1982 hoping to get rich farming coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine. Today, with the country pe...

Magic cover crop carpet

Mar 03, 2017 (SPX)

Organic farmers have to make hard choices between protecting soil from erosion and controlling weeds. For example, large-scale organic farming relies heavily on...

Researchers propose using CRISPR to accelerate plant domestication

Mar 03, 2017 (SPX)

Out of the more than 300,000 plant species in existence, only three species - rice, wheat, and maize - account for most of the plant matter that humans consume,...

SpaceX delivers BAM-FX to ISS for Zero Gravity Solutions

Feb 27, 2017 (SPX)

Zero Gravity Solutions, Inc., an agricultural biotechnology public company commercializing its technology derived from and designed for Space with significant a...

'Our daily bread' has hidden climate costs

Feb 27, 2017 (AFP)

Nearly half the environmental impact of a loaf of bread comes from the "unsustainable use" of fertilisers on wheat crops, researchers said Monday. Synthetic fer...

Brexit sows seeds of doubt for British farmers

Feb 26, 2017 (AFP)

Dependent on foreign workers and subsidies from Brussels, Britain's small but important agricultural sector is losing sleep over the possible fallout from Brexi...

What's the buzz on bee parasites?

Feb 24, 2017 (SPX)

Published in the open-access journal GigaScience is an article that presents the genome of a parasitic mite, Tropilaelaps mercedesae, that infects bee colonies,...

Cultivating cool-for-cash-crop

Feb 24, 2017 (SPX)

When deciding what crops to grow during a season, growers look at several factors. Do the crops have a good yield in their area? Does the area currently have th...

Researchers unravel powerful tool in maize breeding

Feb 24, 2017 (SPX)

A common strategy to create high-yielding plants is hybrid breeding - crossing two different inbred lines to obtain characteristics superior to each parent. How...