Lupin, a well-known garden flower, grows rapidly and puts nutrients back into the soil. A new study focused on how lupin can serve as a winter cover crop and how it can affect subsequent high-biomass sorghum and cotton yields.
An international team of researchers conducting a long-term study has found that climate-friendly farming practices could lead to higher crop yields, reduced costs and improved local ecosystems. In their paper, the group describes 30 long-running farming experiments designed to improve…
Underneath the surface, plant roots are hard at work. Roots, of course, are how plants get water and minerals from the soil. But digging into how different root systems affect crop yields has been challenging for researchers.
Although about 20% of Illinois cropping systems are planted to continuous corn, it's nearly impossible to find fields planted this way for decades at a time. Yet long-term experiments, including over 40 years of continuous corn under different nitrogen fertilizer…
In a recent study a team of researchers tested the potential for increased plant productivity and intrinsic water-use efficiency through the overexpression of inorganic carbon transporter B (ictB) in field-grown tobacco. However, their results showed no significant difference between the…
Fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith) is a devastating insect, which is known for its polyphagous nature. That is, its ability to feed on various kinds of food sources. This insect can migrate up to 100 km in a single…
An international team of researchers, has successfully unravelled the genomes of 418 unique samples of rapeseed from across the globe to identify traits that breeders can use to improve crop yield.
Hybrid agricultural and horticultural crops can play an important role in supporting global food security. They produce higher yields and are often more resistant than non-hybrid varieties to diseases and climate stress. But for many crops, no hybrid varieties are…
The researchers have evaluated the impact of the effects of climate change on vital parameters of bean varieties, such as their morphology, reproduction, production, and phenology. Thus, they have detected some very sensitive types to variations in their conditions of…