Evanston, IL - Today's advanced online publication of the journal Nature Biotechnology carries three important papers on crop disease resistance.

A soil scientist, Nkiruka Odoh, has discovered the use of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus (AMF), a natural-occurring soil organism to enhance drought tolerance of yams in the face of climate change.

The 2015 Agricultural Finance Yearbook, which is the eighth edition in the series, analyses the challenges faced by farmers and those involved in providing finance at both the overall sectoral

To meet rising demand for rice, it is estimated that the global rice production needs to increase by 116 million tons by 2035. Much of the increase has to come from smallholder rice farmers in developing countries. In this article, we review 25 evaluation studies on new rice technologies and practices that have been tried and used by smallholder rice farmers in developing countries. Stress-tolerant rice varieties are found among promising new rice varieties. African farmers benefit from New Rice for Africa (NERICA) varieties.

Wheat, rice, maize, pearl millet, and sorghum provide over half of the world's food calories. To maintain global food security, with the added challenge of climate change, there is an increasing need to exploit existing genetic variability and develop cultivars with superior genetic yield potential and stress adaptation. The opportunity to share knowledge between crops and identify priority traits for future research can be exploited to increase breeding impacts and assist in identifying the genetic loci that control adaptation.

National Agricultural Research Organisation (Naro) is in the process of breeding Irish Potato varieties that are resistant to late blight, a fungal disease ravaging the crop in farmers' fields acro

The CERES (Crop Estimation through Resource and Environment Synthesis)-rice model incorporated in DSSAT version 4.5 was calibrated for genetic coefficients of rice cultivars by conducting field experiments during the kharif season at Jorhat, Kalyani, Ranchi and Bhagalpur, the results of which were used to estimate the gap in rice yield.

Original Source

We conducted a synthesis analysis on data from 86 published field experiments conducted from 1903 to 2014 to explore the specific consequences of post-silking N accumulation (PostN) in New Era vs. Old Era hybrids on grain yield (GY) and recovery from plant N stress at flowering (R1 stage). The Old Era encompassed studies using genotypes released before, and including, 1990 and the New Era included all studies using genotypes released from 1991 to 2014.

Indian scientists must develop domestic genetically modified crops rather than rely on unsuitable foreign technology.

Original Source

Rice is consumed by half of the world’s population. It is a model monocotyledonous crop. In this communication, the effect of 1-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) on the growth, yield attributes and yield is elaborated. Results show that NAA, a synthetic auxin, when applied in spray influences the life cycle of rice via metabolic processes to manifest beneficially through translocating assimilates from source to sink, and hence the yield.

Original Source

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