Agricultural and Forestry Science

Scientists from the University of Minnesota demonstrated yields of corn and soybeans were only minimally reduced when organic production practices were utilized as compared with conventional production practices. After factoring in production costs, net returns between the two production strategies were equivalent.

More than 80% of corn and soybeans produced in the United States is grown in the Midwest, the vast majority with conventional production practices in a corn-soybean rotation requ

An increasing amount of genetic engineering in agriculture closely resembles the conventional crop breeding that has been done for thousands of years, and unnecessarily stringent regulation of this type of gene research is choking off its usefulness, one expert says in a new policy forum in Science.

Government regulations that lump all types of genetic engineering together, instead of making reasonable distinctions between differing technologies, is stifling research, favors the efforts of

Scientists at Horticulture Research International have been studying natural mutations in vegetables in the hope of identifying the genes responsible for limiting uptake of caesium. The results of their quest, to be presented at the annual SEB conference suggest ‘safe’ crops could one day be grown on radioactive soil.

Four million people in Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine currently live in areas where 137Cs deposition densities to soils exceeded 37 kBq m-2 following the Chernobyl accident in

The expensive, energy-intensive process of turning wood into paper costs the pulp and paper industries more than $6 billion a year. Much of that expense involves separating wood’s cellulose from lignin, the glue that binds a tree’s fibers, by using an alkali solution and high temperatures and pressures. Although the lignin so removed is reused as fuel, wood with less lignin and more cellulose would save the industry millions of dollars a year in processing and chemical costs. Research at North Caroli

Significantly improved peanut yields have been achieved by researchers at the Hebrew University Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences in Rehovot.

Through the use of the plant hormone ethylene, the researchers have succeeded in regulating the flowering of the peanut plant, with a resulting four-fold increase in the yield of large peanut pods at harvest time.

The research was carried out by Eliezer Zamski, the Jack Futterman Professor of Agricultural Botan

On Monday 31 March ecologists will meet with molecular biologists at the University of Southampton for the most novel and broad-ranging scientific session of its kind. They will present findings in Session C5/P3 which show that the biochemical pathways which influence a plant’s response to stimuli such as attack, disease or other stresses are not mutually exclusive as previously thought. For example, up until recently the two separate signalling pathways in plants which respond independently to disea