FARM NEWS - AFRICA DAILY

Agriculture must make water use go further: experts

Mar 20, 2018 (AFP)

A day after the United Nations warned that 5.7 billion people could be short of drinking water by 2050, experts said agriculture faces its own threat. A perfect...

NZ dairy giant Fonterra posts loss on China writedown, CEO to go

Mar 20, 2018 (AFP)

Fonterra posted a net loss of NZ$348 million ($250 million) for the six months to January 31, down from a NZ$418 million profit in the same period a year earlie...

Background radiation in UAE's agricultural topsoil found to be lower than global average

Mar 19, 2018 (SPX)

The team, led by researchers from United Arab Emirates University, University of Sharjah and Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR), published their fi...

Harnessing the power of soil microbes for more sustainable farming

Mar 16, 2018 (SPX)

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), working with the University of Arkansas and Glennoe Farms, hope t...

Ag robot speeds data collection, analyses of crops as they grow

Mar 14, 2018 (SPX)

The TerraSentia crop phenotyping robot, developed by a team of scientists at the University of Illinois, will be featured at the 2018 Energy Innovation Summit T...

Malaysia's honey hunters defy angry bees to harvest treetop treasure

Mar 13, 2018 (AFP)

The honey hunters, as they are known, are rag-tag groups of villagers who head to remote corners of the jungle every year in search of the rare nectar, hidden i...

Agricultural sustainability project reached 21 million smallholder farmers across China

Mar 12, 2018 (SPX)

Yet sharing best practices with smallholder farmers, who often have limited resources to invest in their livelihoods and who number in the hundreds of millions ...

Commercial pesticides: Not as safe as they seem

Mar 12, 2018 (SPX)

"Exposure to environmental levels of some of these adjuvant mixtures can affect non-target organisms - and even can cause chronic human disease," says Dr Robin ...

Estimates overstated for Mongolian rangelands damaged by livestock

Mar 08, 2018 (SPX)

An estimated 70 percent of the rangelands in Mongolia are damaged by livestock and unregulated land use. But new research led by Colorado State University found...

Land-use planning could reconcile agricultural growth with conservation of nature

Mar 08, 2018 (SPX)

The researchers evaluated how far global biodiversity loss could be minimized by such planning. They found that 88 percent of the biodiversity that is expected ...

Scientists engineer crops to conserve water, resist drought

Mar 08, 2018 (SPX)

The research is part of the international research project Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) that is supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foun...

Thousands of farmers march in Madrid over 'surreal' drought

Mar 07, 2018 (AFP)

The region that goes from the cities of Alicante to Almeria, part of Spain's so-called Levante coastline known as Europe's vegetable garden, has been hit hard b...

Carrefour's chicken blockchain set to lay eggs

Mar 06, 2018 (AFP)

Blockchain is the technology behind cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, but companies and public authorities are rapidly creating new applications which allows ...

Genetic tweak makes plants use 25% less water

Mar 06, 2018 (AFP)

By altering a single gene, scientists coaxed tobacco plants -- a model crop often used in experiments -- to grow to near normal size with only 75 percent of the...

Soil cannot halt climate change

Mar 06, 2018 (SPX)

The findings come from an analysis of the rates of change of carbon in soil by scientists at Rothamsted Research where samples have been collected from fields s...

Scientists monitor crop photosynthesis, performance using invisible light

Mar 06, 2018 (SPX)

"Photosynthetic performance is a key trait to monitor as it directly translates to yield potential," said Kaiyu Guan, an assistant professor in the College of A...

'Doomsday' seed vault gets makeover as Arctic heats up

Mar 02, 2018 (AFP)

Dubbed the "Noah's Ark" of food crops, the Global Seed Vault is buried inside a former coal mine on Svalbard, a remote Arctic island in a Norwegian archipelago ...

Cuban cigars: a treasure from Havana to Beijing

Mar 02, 2018 (AFP)

The island nation's legendary cigars have closed another year for the record books, in large part thanks to Chinese consumption. "This tobacco makes the Chinese...

EU food agency says three pesticides harm bees as ban calls grow

Feb 28, 2018 (AFP)

The report said "most uses" of the three neonicotinoid pesticides, which are based on the chemical structure of nicotine and attack the nervous systems of insec...

The secret to tripling the number of grains in sorghum and perhaps other staple crops

Feb 28, 2018 (SPX)

In new research reported in Nature Communications, scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have figured out how that genetic change boosts the plant'...