The use of robots, drones and AI tools in agriculture is already paying off on 42% of the world’s cropland. This could increase to 50% in the next 20 years and to as much as 75% if every country tightened environmental regulations. If every country loosened its regulations it would fall to 31%. These are the main findings from an international study led by the University of Bonn, which is the first to estimate the profitability of smart farming worldwide. What is more, high-tech agriculture often proves profitable precisely in parts of the world struggling with environmental problems such as water stress and overfertilization. The results of the study have been published in the journal PNAS. 

Depending on the cultivar, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere can significantly alter the protein composition of wheat. This affects not only baking quality but potentially also the tolerability of wheat products. This is the conclusion of a new study led by the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich. According to the study, the adaptation of crops to climate change should in the future focus not only on high yields but also on quality characteristics such as protein composition.

Around 500 researchers, farmers, policymakers and citizens gathered in Coimbra, Portugal, from 7 to 11 September 2026 for the Soils for Europe Conference, organised by the EU-funded SOLO project with almost 40 co-organising projects. Held as the EU’s first soil health law takes effect, the conference looked back on five years of Mission Soil and explored how research can be turned into policy and practice.

Under the dual challenges of global climate change and food security, agricultural environmental monitoring is at a critical juncture of transitioning from “passive remediation after the event” to “proactive prevention and control in advance.” With the development of smart agriculture, although mobile robots and multimodal sensors have addressed the problems of low efficiency and high cost in traditional manual sampling, most existing monitoring solutions remain at the “post-event detection” stage—that is, pollution has already occurred before an alarm finally arrives, causing control measures to often lag behind. To truly achieve green and sustainable agricultural development, there is an urgent need to give mobile robots a “smart brain”, enabling them not only to perceive the present but also to accurately predict the dynamic trends of pollutants based on complex environmental data.

Soils are among the planet's largest carbon reservoirs, yet salinity and land degradation threaten their ability to store carbon and support agriculture. Improving carbon storage in salt-affected farmland could therefore offer a dual benefit: restoring soil health while supporting climate change mitigation.

The fight for survival in the forest is fierce: light, water and nutrients are all limited. This is particularly true in “mast years” – times when trees and shrubs produce an unusually large crop of fruits, nuts, or seeds. Then the race for growth is really on. But can differences in height between trees in their first year of life make a difference to their future, even if these differences are just one or two centimetres? Researchers at the University of Göttingen have now shown that beech seedlings which are slightly taller than their immediate neighbours at the end of their first year of life have a higher chance of survival two decades later. The results were published in the Journal of Ecology.

Waterlogged paddy fields are widely distributed in rainy and low-lying areas of southern China, accounting for 15%–20% of the local rice planting area. The strongly reducing environment formed by long-term flooding not only reduces rice yields by 30%–50% compared with normal paddy fields, but also makes waterlogged soils a core source of agricultural methane emissions, creating a real contradiction with the green and low-carbon development of agriculture and the advancement of carbon neutrality strategies. Oxygen deficiency and the accumulation of ferrous ions and organic acids in waterlogged soils both poison crop roots and immobilize key nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium, becoming a prominent problem constraining the coordinated development of food security and farmland ecology.