The U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has announced $5 million in funding to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and partner institutions to develop a new variety of corn called NSave that will reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining crop yield.

Smaller poops from smaller birds carry very low risk of foodborne pathogens on farms, finds a UC Davis study. 

CABBI scientists have developed a lab-to-field pipeline to deliver sorghum that’s high in TAG. The researchers engineered sorghum to accumulate up to 5.5% dry weight TAG in its leaves and 3.5% dry weight in its stems under field conditions — 78 times and 58 times more than unmodified sorghum, respectively. This level of production could provide about 1.4 times more oil per hectare than soybeans, making this a promising new feedstock for renewable fuels.

Invasive pests are slipping unnoticed into northern Europe in huge shipments of cut flowers and potted plants, say researchers, with potential to damage food crops and the natural environment

Is it possible to feed the planet in a healthy way while reducing the use of land and water? A study conducted by researchers from the Glob3science Lab of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano and published in Nature Sustainability, proposes a global model that makes the best use of agricultural and water resources, making the adoption of the EAT-Lancet universal reference diet a sustainable possibility.

DDT soil pollution is still a major problem in many parts of the world. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a new method to manage ecological risks from the toxin by binding it with biochar. When they mixed biochar into contaminated soil at a former tree nursery, DDT uptake by earthworms in the soil was halved. This method may enable the growing of certain crops on land that is currently considered unusable due to the environmental risks.