Agriculture

Smallholder wheat farmers in Northwestern Ethiopia are selling just over half of their harvest, according to a new study that...

Growing animal cells in the laboratory has long been framed as one of the most promising answers to a stubborn...

Hybridization is the engine of modern crop improvement, yet for one of the world’s most important legume crops it remains...

A single spray of fragmented DNA extracted from a plant’s own species may be enough to arm a crop against...

Wheat feeds billions, and the shape of its spike, the flowering head that carries the grain, is one of the...

Every night, across farmlands in China and much of the world, light traps lure nocturnal insect pests toward glowing panels,...

In an era when three staple crops—maize, wheat, and rice—feed more than four billion people, scientists are turning their attention...

Deep in the mountains and arid plains of Iran, a quiet revolution in plant science is taking shape under the...

What if the key to keeping meat fresher for longer has been hiding in a giant, mild-mannered cousin of ordinary...

Abiotic stresses—drought, salinity, extreme temperatures, and heavy metal toxicity—are responsible for an estimated 40 to 70 percent of yield losses...

Green manure could be one of the most underused tools in the fight against soil degradation, according to a comprehensive...

Beneath the quiet canopy of cold-temperate poplar-birch forests in northern China, an invisible metabolic drama is unfolding. As secondary forests...

Saline-alkali soils are quietly swallowing the world’s farmland, and a team of plant geneticists in China has unveiled a new...

Forage crops—the grasses and legumes that underpin the world’s meat and dairy industries—have long been treated as a single, uniform...

Ethiopia grows far more grain than its population needs for a healthy diet, yet produces only a fraction of the...

Microplastics have quietly become one of the most pervasive contaminants in the modern food supply, and a new comprehensive review...

Rice feeds more than half of humanity, and the shape, size, and colour of its grains sit at the heart...

Wheat feeds billions of people, but the hidden half of the plant—the root system that anchors it and draws water...

Willow trees have quietly shaped human medicine for millennia, from ancient brews of willow bark to the synthesis of aspirin,...

Rice blast, the fungal disease long regarded as the single most destructive threat to the world’s most important staple crop,...