Agricultural and Forestry Science

Long-term research by CSIRO Livestock Industries has proved that selectively breeding sheep for worm resistance can significantly reduce Australian farmers’ traditional reliance on drenching products in high rainfall areas.

Coordinator of the Nemesis project, CSIRO’s Amy Bell, says that over a two-year monitoring period, merino weaners bred for parasitic worm resistance within the project’s demonstration flock required seven fewer drenches to maintain worm levels equivalent t

Most corn earworms cannot survive the cold of a Northeastern winter, but each summer this sweet corn pest arrives back in the cornfields of the northeastern United States more quickly than most people believe is possible. Now, a team of Penn State meteorologists thinks it knows how the small moths travel long distances so quickly, and perhaps can predict where and when they will appear next.

“For years, researchers have assumed that the moths travel in parcels of air,” says Matthew Welshans

A team of CSIRO Livestock Industries researchers are helping to make pigs healthier and happier, while fattening the bottom line.

Dr David Strom leads a team at CSIRO Livestock Industries’ Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL), detecting and modulating immune responses in pigs.

“In Australia 20 per cent of fresh meat production is pork,” Dr Strom says. “World-wide there is more pork produced than any other livestock meat – accounting for more than 40 per cent of the world

Research at Harper Adams University College has shown how spraying wheat plants with milk can help to cure mildew disease.

South American research showed four years ago that milk could help in the fight against mildew disease on squash plants, and milk is used to treat this disease by some organic gardeners, as well as by grape vine growers in Australia.

Further research at Harper Adams, by Research Assistant Georgina Drury working with Dr Peter Kettlewell, and published in the cu

New evidence published online in Pest Management Science reports the first signs of resistance to pyrethroid insecticides in a population of mosquitoes from Marin County, California. The species in question is not only a major pest, but also acts as a vector of West Nile virus, a virus that spread rapidly westward across the United States after it first invaded the new world in New York in 1999.

The study, carried out by researchers in California, determined that the Culex pipiens complex m

Scientists in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM) at Virginia Tech are trying to clone cattle that are genetically incapable of developing “Mad Cow Disease.”

As federal and state government officials grapple with strategies to limit the economic and health risks associated with the troublesome discovery of the nation’s first case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) – or “Mad Cow Disease”– Will Eyestone, research associate professor in Large Animal