CABI and ACIAR sign AUD $2.1 million four-year agreement to steer future collaboration

CABI and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) have signed a four-year agreement worth AUD $2.1 million to guide future collaboration that will fight a range of crop pests and disease which threaten global food security.
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Test your plant health knowledge with the plant doctor quiz

Birdseye view of a plant clinic in Peru. A plant farmer gives advice to a farmer on a crop sample.
>> Latest quiz just added Plantwise plant doctors are at the heart of our plant clinic network providing advice and information to farmers, logging their data for the Plantwise Knowledge Bank, and always adapting to new outbreaks and technologies. Think you’ve got what it takes to be a plant doctor? Take our online quiz and…
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Unregistered herbicides use rampant among smallholders

By Alex Abutu. Reblogged from SciDev.Net. African rice smallholders are increasingly using low-quality, unregistered herbicides because of inadequate capacity of governments to enforce strict monitoring of national pesticides regulations, a study says.
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Plantwise successes revealed in Impact Story Competition

The successes of smallholder farmers in Nepal, Uganda and Kenya – thanks to help from CABI – have become the focus of the Plantwise Impact Story Competition won by three extension workers who helped them combat crop pests and diseases. Debraj Adhikari, a Senior Plant Protection Officer from Nepal, plant doctor Mubunga Joshua from Uganda…
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Update: New Pest & Disease Records (05 February 2019)

strawberry punnets
We’ve selected a few of the latest new geographic, host and species records for plant pests and diseases from CAB Abstracts. Records this fortnight include the first report of grapevine yellow speckle viroid-2 infecting grapevines, the first report of hop stunt viroid infecting strawberries in China and the first report of bean yellow mosaic virus…
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Crops downwind from wildfires at risk from atmospheric pollution

With increasing numbers of wildfire disasters globally, research has shown that pollutants released from wildfires can affect crops, forests and other vegetation hundreds of kilometers downwind from the source. As global temperatures increase, moisture and precipitation levels change, and dry areas becoming drier, the likelihood of droughts and prolonged wildfire seasons are increasing.These exacerbated conditions…
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Using rice to filter pesticide runoff

Rice has been a staple food crop for millions of people for hundreds of years. This important crop is now a major part of 20% of the world’s population, with it being grown on every continent except Antarctica.Whilst rice is known to be an important part of our diet, recently published research has shown how…
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Plant doctor advice increasing availability of clean banana suckers in Kitema, Uganda

In Uganda the majority of the young people are unemployed, and efforts to create employment opportunities within the agriculture sector are yielding little to no interest among them. Agriculture is not viewed as a viable employment sector, due to the perceptions that agriculture as a profession is labour intensive, results in high crop losses from…
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Test your plant health knowledge with the plant doctor quiz

Birdseye view of a plant clinic in Peru. A plant farmer gives advice to a farmer on a crop sample.
>> First quiz of 2019 just added Plantwise plant doctors are at the heart of our plant clinic network providing advice and information to farmers, logging their data for the Plantwise Knowledge Bank, and always adapting to new outbreaks and technologies. Think you’ve got what it takes to be a plant doctor? Take our online…
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Amid global soil crisis, governments struggle to reach farmers

By Fatima Arkin. Reblogged from devex. To help tackle nutrient deficiency and plastic pollution in India’s soils, the country has one of the best knowledge delivery systems and trained human resource power in agriculture research. And yet, over 59 percent of the farming households receive no assistance from either their government or the private sector,…
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