Record crop losses cost the United States $17.3B last year
Over $17 billion was spent in 2012 on farm insurance claims for destroyed crops in the U.S., up from an average of $4.1 billion per year from 2001 until 2011. This record-breaking jump in insurance pay-outs was in large part due to extreme weather conditions over the past growing season. Drought, heat and hot wind accounted…
Plantwise Photo Of The Month- September
This photo was taken in July when data management training and Module 4 training took part in Sri Lanka. Twenty-seven participants took part in the Module 4 training, in which methods for managing and monitoring clinic data collected at plant clinics in Sri Lanka were discussed.
Black Sigatoka Ravages Caribbean
Caribbean banana farmers are abandoning fields where crops have been badly affected by Black Sigatoka disease. Black Sigatoka has badly affected several countries in the region, including Dominica, St. Lucia, Grenada and Guyana. Black Sigatoka is considered the most destructive disease of bananas and plantains and is caused by the fungus Mycosphaerella fijiensis. It first arrived in…
Two million red palm weevils removed without the use of pesticides
In the first half of 2013 two million red palm weevils were removed from farms in Abu Dhabi using pheromone traps. The large number of red palm weevils in the area prompted the launch of the initiative, which forms part of the Abu Dhabi Farmers’ Services Centre’s (ADFSC) Integrated Pest Management project. The project was…
Open source seeds
“Open source software is accompanied by a licence that encourages people to share it and create new programs with it, and at the same time prevents anyone from releasing a program that uses the code under any other form of licence. The creativity embedded in the code cannot be privatised. Kloppenburg and a group of…
Herbicide Resistance Gene In Black-Grass and Rye-Grass Identified
BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) and Syngenta funded scientists at the University of York and University of Durham have discovered a gene called AmGSTF1 that plays a key role in controlling multiple herbicide resistance in black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides) and annual rye-grass (Lolium rigidum). Now the gene that confers resistance has been identified, it…
Plantwise Photo Of The Month – July
This photo shows the Plantwise Knowledge Bank booth at the CABI Review Conference 2013, which took place from the 27-28th June in Oxford, UK. 70 delegates from 36 countries attended the review conference, in which research priorities aimed at protecting global food supply were discussed. To find out more about the review conference you can…
World Food Prize 2013 winners announced
The most prestigious prize in food and agriculture, the World Food Prize, has this year been awarded to three scientists, Belgian Marc Van Montagu and Americans Mary-Dell Chilton and Robert T. Fraley for their work on agricultural biotechnology. These scientists have all worked on different projects with one goal in mind: to develop better crops…
The Evolution of Insect Resistance to Bt Crops
A group of scientists at the University of Arizona have this week published a paper in Nature Biotechnology on the evolution of resistance in insect pests populations to insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that are produced by transgenic crops. Resistance is defined as the phenotype of an individual that gives the individual the ability to…