A UK-led research collaboration has taken a significant step in the global effort to protect cereal crops from the devastating blast fungus pathogen.

Climate change is causing many fruit trees to flower earlier, increasing their exposure to damaging late spring frosts. A study led by the University of Göttingen shows that the plant growth regulator ethephon can delay flowering in Kordia – a variety of sweet cherry – potentially protecting blossoms and developing fruitlets from frost. The treatment did not significantly delay flowering in a second sweet cherry or two apple varieties, highlighting the importance of crop and cultivar selection. The results were published in BMC Plant Biology.

Sheep grazing, rather than honey bees, could be the bigger threat to wild pollinators on Scotland’s moorlands, according to a new University of Bristol-led study. The research, published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, has found that grazing in spring can remove much of the nectar emerging bumblebees need, while commercial honey bee hives introduced during the summer heather flowering period have a much smaller impact. 

The Bezos Earth Fund is granting $18 million for ROOTS, a three-year Salk project to test deeper-rooted, more resilient crops that can store more carbon in soil. The project builds on six years of work through Salk’s Harnessing Plants Initiative, which has identified 347 gene candidates and advanced 37 projects across genes and crops. The grant brings the Bezos Earth Fund’s total support for Salk to $48 million.

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States. Each year, vehicles, machinery, environmental hazards, and other incidents cause thousands of injuries and hundreds of fatalities. A thorough understanding of the main risks is key to preventing accidents and promoting agricultural safety. A research team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has developed an interactive platform that allows users to obtain customized information about agricultural injuries. The researchers describe their work in a new article.

Insect ‘detectives’ have discovered two new types of large stick insects, showing scientists are still uncovering new species in some of Australia’s most well-studied landscapes.

China is the world’s largest tea producer, and the tea industry is an important specialty industry for increasing agricultural efficiency and farmers’ income. Frequent tea diseases severely affect yield and quality. Traditional manual diagnosis is inefficient and error-prone, while conventional plant protection operations rely mainly on large-scale pesticide application, resulting in high costs and serious pollution. Current deep learning-based disease detection technologies are easily affected by complex environments in real tea plantations, such as lighting, occlusion, and rainy weather, and their accuracy and stability are insufficient to meet real-time field detection needs, becoming a key bottleneck in the development of smart tea plantations.

A group of researchers in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder have developed a low-cost electronic sensor capable of continuously monitoring soil pH, offering a new window into the hidden world below our feet.