Modern agriculture is synonymous with monoculture. That lack of diversity is bad news for plants’ natural immune defenses. Researchers are figuring out how to help plants fend off microbes – without pesticides.
Articles on Crops
Displaying 141 - 160 of 177 articles
Farms on Sydney’s fringes supply 20% of the city’s food. That could drop by more than half if urban sprawl isn’t kept in check.
Rapid genetic disease screening will be the key to saving East Africa’s crops - just as it was during West Africa’s ebola crisis.
The world’s ‘drylands’ – already home to 38% of the world’s people – are set to dry out even more. And that could harm the soil microbes that keep soils healthy and help crops to grow.
Next time you reach for the honey, spare a thought for the other vital insects that pollinate our crops.
Australia’s risks losing its valuable native plants that could help solve a global food problem. So do we need new laws to stop the seeds being taken overseas?
On the African continent, more fire for crops leads to less rainfall.
Papua New Guinea is now facing a drought and frosts that look set to be worse than 1997, when hundreds of people died. So how can memories of 1997 save lives over the next few months?
Only a few African countries are using genetically modified organisms for their crops.
Vaccines aren’t just for animals anymore. Research shows priming plants with pathogen-derived compounds strengthens their immune systems and enhances protection against future attack.
Hardy new grains are being developed that can cope with extreme bursts of heat.
A wheat-infecting pathogen is on the march in the UK - but new genetic techniques will enable faster, clearer diagnosis.
Africa will be able to feed itself in the next 15 years. That’s one of the big “bets on the future” that Bill and Melinda Gates have made in their foundation’s latest annual letter. Helped by other breakthroughs…
New technology to tackle biosecurity challenges down the track is one of the five megatrends identified in today’s CSIRO report Australia’s Biosecurity Future: preparing for future biological challenges…
We are in the middle of one of the biggest experiments in human history. At its core is the homogenisation of global food systems, which increasingly must deliver the same products to an expanding population…
Welcome to GM in Australia, a series looking at the facts, ethics, regulations and research into genetically modified crops. In this first instalment, Peter Langridge describes two GM techniques: selective…
The European policies designed to encourage a more biodiverse environment that is better able to support wildlife and plants are failing. In fact, our analysis of the reforms designed to “green” the EU…
Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be reducing the nutritional quality of food, new research shows. Researchers…
Growing plants amongst photovoltaic panels could allow solar farms to not only generate electricity, but help produce crops…
Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in Belgium on June…
Top contributors
-
Associate Professor, Department of Entomology; African-American Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
-
Professor of Plant Sciences, University of Nottingham
-
CEO, Crops for the Future Research Centre and Professor of Global Food Security, University of Nottingham
-
Associate professor, food chemistry, University of Pretoria
-
Professor in Plant Biology, La Trobe University
-
Associate Professor in Wildlife Conservation, Edith Cowan University
-
Senior Fellow, Department of Agricultural Economics, Stellenbosch University
-
Ph.D. Student in the School of Plant and Environmental Science, Virginia Tech
-
Research scientist at Plant Breeding Institute, University of Sydney, University of Sydney
-
Special Professor of Phytopathology, Wageningen University
-
Senior Principal Research Scientist, Farming Systems, CSIRO
-
Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Affairs, College of Liberal Arts, Colorado State University
-
Professor of Ecology, University of Cambridge
-
Professor of Agriculture and Food Sciences, The University of Queensland
-
CSIRO