Researchers have developed a new way to generate realistic synthetic training data for agricultural robots by recreating tomato cultivation environments in a virtual world. The approach could help overcome one of the biggest barriers in agricultural robotics: the time and labor required to collect and manually label real-world data under challenging greenhouse conditions such as changing lighting, dense foliage, and fruit occlusion.

Plants may not appear aggressive, but they can still defend themselves while under attack. When caterpillars chomp the leaves of bean plants, these plants release gases that lure predatory wasps. The wasps prey on the caterpillars, saving the plants from further destruction. In a paper published May 27 in Science Advances, a UW-led team demonstrated that this defense strategy is run by a protein called INR, or inceptin receptor.

Greenhouse cherry tomatoes are valued for their flavor, nutrition, and high market demand, but producing more fruit sustainably remains a challenge. One major obstacle is phosphorus, an essential nutrient that plants need for root development, flowering, and fruit production. Although greenhouse soils often contain large amounts of phosphorus from repeated fertilizer use, much of it becomes locked in forms that plants cannot easily absorb.

Virtual reality is entering the agricultural science classroom, and University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture researchers are helping teachers incorporate and create their own virtual reality resources.

With a $500,000 grant from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a faculty team in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications is building on their findings from a previously funded USDA grant project aimed to further develop efforts to train secondary school teachers and bring virtual reality (VR) to the classroom through the Agriscience Metaverse Academy.

As climate change increases the frequency of drought, excessive rainfall, and other extreme weather events, farmers face growing uncertainty about crop production. Understanding how farmers perceive and respond to that uncertainty can help improve agricultural policy and climate adaptation strategies. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Michigan State University examines farmer risk preferences when dealing with climate impacts.

DEET has been one of the most effective insect repellents for the past 80 years, but there could be a chink in the quintessential repellent’s armour. Claudio Lazzari from University of Tours, France, and colleagues reveal in Journal of Experimental Biology that yellow fever mosquitoes can learn to associate the smell of DEET with food, meaning that they could be more likely to bite people that smell of DEET, placing the indispensable repellent at risk.

A recently published collection of writings on perennial agriculture, “Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods“ (Princeton University Press), makes a cultural argument as much as an agricultural one: that perennial foods — crops that return year after year, building deep root systems and healthier soil — represent not just a different way of farming but a different way of belonging to the earth. The collection includes a contribution from Megan Kaminski, poet and professor of environmental studies at the University of Kansas.