India will need to feed approximately 394 million more people by 2050, and that’s going to be a significant challenge. Nutrient deficiencies are already widespread in India today—30 percent or more are anemic—and many regions are chronically water-stressed. Making matters worse, evidence suggests that monsoons are delivering less rainfall than they used to. But a study published today in Science Advances shares a brighter outlook: replacing some rice with less thirsty crops could dramatically reduce water demand in India, while also improving nutrition.

Electronic radio tags could be used to track invasive Asian hornets and stop them colonising the UK and killing honeybees, new research shows.

Climate projections indicate more warming will occur in the Northeast than other sections of the United States, and that has implications for corn crops and dairy farms in the region by 2050, researchers warn.

Young turtle doves raised on a diet of seeds from non-cultivated arable plants are more likely to survive after fledging than those relying on food provided in people’s gardens, new research into Britain’s fastest declining bird species has shown. 

Deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, nitrogen pollution – today’s agricultural feed cultivation for cattle, pigs and chicken comes with tremendous impacts for the environment and climate. Cultivating feed in industrial facilities instead of on croplands might help to alleviate the critical implications in the agricultural food supply chain. Protein-rich microbes, produced in large-scale industrial facilities, are likely to increasingly replace traditional crop-based feed. A new study now published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology for the first time estimates the economic and environmental potential of feeding microbial protein to pigs, cattle and chicken on a global scale. The researchers find that by replacing only 2 percent of livestock feed by protein-rich microbes, more than 5 percent of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, global cropland area and global nitrogen losses could each be decreased.

A heat wave sweeps through a city and people swelter, running indoors to find air conditioning. But crops out in a field aren’t so lucky. For them, there is no escape.

Reductions in water use first observed in 2010 continue, show ongoing effort towards “efficient use of critical water resources.”

I recently wrote a press release for another cool plant study CSRS. This time, a group discovered a process through which gene expression in plants is regulated by light. They found that blue light triggers a shift in which portion of a gene is ultimately expressed.

Researchers at Oregon State University have learned that a specific wavelength range of blue fluorescent light set bees abuzz.

Palm oil has become part of our daily lives, but a recent study by EPFL and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) serves as a reminder that intensive farming of this crop has a major impact on the environment. Both short- and long-term solutions exist, however.