Feature Channels: Agriculture

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Encroaching woody plants such as the eastern redcedar are affecting many privately owned grasslands in the Midwestern United States. The attitudes and behaviors of private landowners to redcedar expansion are essential to preserving the remaining tallgrass prairie. Landowners must join forces to identify management strategies that will minimize this threat to grassland ecosystems. However, the owners’ attitudes toward taking steps to manage the restoration of the grasslands may affect efforts to preserve the prairie.

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A Kansas State University research team is working to reduce the percentage of cattle affected by bovine lameness.

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Scientists have identified the genes related to leaf angle in corn (maize) – a key trait for planting crops closer together, which has led to an eight-fold increase in yield since the early 1900s.

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An international team of researchers have completed the first DNA sequence of any strawberry plant, giving breeders much-needed tools to create tastier, healthier strawberries. UNH’s Tom Davis was a significant contributor to the genome sequence of the woodland strawberry, which was published in the journal Nature Genetics.

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Scientists have developed a method of accounting for spatial trend in single crop field trials.

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University of Utah researchers developed a new concept in water treatment: an electrobiochemical reactor in which a low electrical voltage is applied to microbes to help them quickly and efficiently remove pollutants from mining, industrial and agricultural wastewater.

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Research supports what Cape Cod cranberry growers already suspected: The traditional “flow-through” bogs have a negative impact on stream quality compared with modern bogs.

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Weizmann scientists and a global team have produced the full genome of the woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca). The wild strawberry has important nutritive properties, as well as qualities that make it an ideal model plant; e.g., it could provide insight into related agricultural crops from the rose family, including apple and almond trees.

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Georgia Tech Regents professor Mark Borodovsky led efforts in identifying protein-coding genes in the newly sequenced woodland strawberry genome. The development is expected to yield tastier, hardier varieties of the berry and other crops in its family.

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Researchers at the University of California-Davis, Kansas State University, and the USDA Cereal Disease Laboratory in Minnesota have mapped and characterized a gene resistant to Ugandan stem rust.

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A Kansas State University professor is part of a national research team that discovered that streams and rivers produce three times more greenhouse gas emissions than estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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The United States is being invaded and the “aliens” coming into our country are exotic plant species—weeds, that is.

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Faculty, staff, students and members of the Western Illinois University community have the opportunity to support organic crop research, pick up a stocking stuffer or holiday gift this season and show school spirit -- all with one little bag of popcorn. WIU's School of Agriculture is once again selling its Rocky Popcorn, purple and gold (WIU's colors) popcorn, grown on WIU's Allison Organic Research and Demonstration Farm in Warren County (IL).

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Creating a trading market giving farmers financial incentives for using best fertilizer practices can benefit water quality, help fight climate change, and raise farmer income, finds a new study by the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Environmental Research. Md. is one of a handful of states considering both fertilizer and CO2 markets.

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As public concern grows about preserving open rangeland for future generations, it becomes clear that those future generations must be taught to manage and appreciate the land themselves. Educating today’s youth about their natural environment is the best way to ensure stewardship of public lands for tomorrow. The 4-H program can provide a platform for this.

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John Wiersma, a researcher at the University of Minnesota Northwest Research and Outreach Center at Crookston, concluded a study examining the effect of nitrogen based fertilizers on soybean crops grown in iron deficient soil.

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Rice production faces the threat of a growing worldwide water scarcity. Approximately, 75% of the world’s rice is grown in flooded, lowland conditions. Scientists have developed a rice crop that is not only drought tolerant but high yielding.

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In Uganda, the sweet potato is a major staple crop. In an effort to identify, collect, evaluate, and mitigate the loss of important types, a study was conducted by the National Crops Resources Research Institute in Namulaong, Uganda.

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The well-reported arsenic contamination of drinking water in Bangladesh – called the “largest mass poisoning of a population in history” by the World Health Organization and known to be responsible for a host of slow-developing diseases – has now been shown to have an immediate and toxic effect on the struggling nation’s economy.

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A study recently published in the Journal of Environmental Quality by a team from Cornell University and the University of Illinois-Urbana found that tile drainage systems in upper Mississippi farmlands – from southwest Minnesota to Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio – are the biggest contributors of "dead zone" fueling nitrogen runoff into the Gulf of Mexico.

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Scientists are learning more about the life stages and biology of an insect that may compete with humans for the energy crops of the future — the insect some scientists are calling the switchgrass moth.

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Researchers at Iowa State University, China Agricultural University and the Beijing Genomics Institute in China recently re-sequenced and compared six elite inbred corn (maize) lines, including the parents of the most productive commercial hybrids in China and found entire genes that were missing from one line to another.

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The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) has established a set of Grand Challenges to help steer the direction of research to critical areas with the most need of exploration, examination, and development.

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Higher concentrations of hormones in waterways have been found to cause physiological and sexual impairment in fish. A new study examines estrogen concentrations in runoff from agricultural plots fertilized with chicken manure.

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Hair clippings, cayenne pepper and raw eggs – these are just a few of the odd ingredients recommended to keep those pesky deer away from your backyard garden. But what about farmers who have hundreds of acres of Christmas trees to protect? North Carolina State University extension specialists have now found an effective, inexpensive alternative to available commercial products to keep the deer at bay.

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Researchers at Iowa State University examined 12 varieties of sorghum grass grown in single and double cropping systems to test the efficiency of double cropping sorghum grass to increase its yield for biofuel production.

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New hemlock hybrids that are tolerant to the invasive insect known as hemlock woolly adelgid have been created by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists.

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A team of international researchers led by ancient DNA experts from the University of Adelaide has resolved the longstanding issue of the origins of the people who introduced farming to Europe some 8000 years ago.

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In a study funded by the Commonwealth Government of Australia, the soil retention of three types of selenium was tested. Since selenium deficiency is prevalent in Southeast Asia, researchers are studying the best biofortification for lowland rice production.

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A recently patented invention from a Kansas State University research team aims to control a devastating parasite that causes millions of dollars in crop damage each year.

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The best method to combat weeds is not one method, but a combination of approaches. “Integrated weed management” merges several single-management strategies, such as crop rotation, optimal timing of planting, spacing of crops, and chemical weed control, to successfully suppress weeds.

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Which are the best pieces of pork, what their texture is, how moist they are – the secrets pigs keep from even the most skilled butchers – are about to be revealed, thanks to a sophisticated new technique that has been developed by McGill University researchers in conjunction with Agriculture Canada and the pork industry.

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A common roadside plant could have the right stuff to become a new source of biofuel, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) studies.

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When you think of a ranch, images of cattle roaming miles of wide-open rangeland come to mind. People may not be in the picture at all. But it is the people behind the ranch who make it a success. Principles of human resource management must apply to ranch employees just as they do to workers in an office or a hospital.

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Communication is essential to any relationship—including that between weed scientists and farmers.

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Nature’s capacity to store carbon, the element at the heart of global climate woes, is steadily eroding as the world’s farmers expand croplands at the expense of native ecosystem such as forests. A group of universities is releasing a study on the topic.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $43,809 in funding for South Dakota State University to plan for the development of a sustainable organic tribal bison production system.

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Agronomists, Crop and Soil Scientists Convene in Long Beach Oct. 31-Nov. 3 to Discuss Agriculture and Environmental Sustainability.

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Copper sulfate has emerged as an effective treatment for Ichthyophthirius multifiliis, also known as “Ich,” a protozoan parasite that appears as white spots on infected fish, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist.

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A Cornell University-led team of industry and academic researchers is launching an effort to develop a $100 million broccoli industry on the East Coast over the next 10 years – a move that could reduce fuel costs, cut carbon dioxide emissions from cross-country trucks and save water in the western United States.

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A case study published in the 2010 Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education by professors at Washington State University studies the challenges one organization faced in maintaining an urban market garden.

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A Creighton University School of Medicine researcher has been awarded a $2.7 million grant by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate a possible link between the ingestion of tortillas and corn-based food products contaminated with a fungal toxin and increased risk for birth defects.

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Researchers at the University of Florida have published a report regarding the trends in water quality feeding into Everglades National Park. The report can be found in the September-October 2010 Journal of Environmental Quality.

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Iowa State's Jacob Petrich and his collaborators have discovered that the eyes of sheep infected with scrapie return an intense glow when they're hit with blue light. That suggests tests can be developed to quickly find mad cow and other diseases.

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Scientists at the University of Adelaide have discovered new cases of herbicide resistance in annual ryegrass, one of the world's most serious and costly weeds.

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Climate change in the Prairie Pothole Region poses problems for wetland-dependent organisms such as ducks, but farmers could help ease the impact by the way they farm.

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Forget all the tacky jokes about cow flatulence causing climate change. A new study reports that the dairy industry is responsible for only about 2.0 percent of all US greenhouse gas emissions.

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Researchers may have a greater understanding of the mysterious colony collapse disorder.

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A group of agricultural scientists reported in today’s issue of the journal Science that corn that has been genetically engineered to produce insect-killing proteins isolated from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) provides significant economic benefits even to neighboring farmers who grow non-transgenic varieties of corn.

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Widespread planting of genetically modified Bt corn throughout the Upper Midwest has suppressed populations of the European corn borer, a major insect pest of corn, with the majority of the economic benefits going to growers who do not plant Bt corn, reports a multistate team of scientists in the Oct. 8 edition of the journal Science.