Trees grow six times taller in strange Amazonian soil.
BBC’s Science Focus is digging in the dirt to get inside the mystery of “dark earth,” which seems to make the Amazon as fertile as […]
agronomy
Ancient megafarm found in Michigan.
PhysOrg reports on an archaeological discovery in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which seems to have been the site of a 1,000-year-old Native American farming complex more […]
Ready for the next pandemic? Check with your local farmers.
KFF Health News has a not-so-cheerful outlook on the US national health services in an article about livestock farms with a headline that starts “How […]
The way you water your tomatoes matters, not just how much you water ’em.
The American Chemical Society looks at homegrown (or farmed) tomatoes and finds that the way in which they’re watered can make a difference in how […]
Martian soil is nice for rice.
Science News reports on a presentation at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by researcher Abhilash Ramachandran, who found that rice – one of […]
Solar panels increase crop yields, insulate reservoirs, and can help farmers.
PNAS reports on some unanticipated consequences of solar farming – but things that banks of solar panels that are unexpectedly good, not bad: To generate […]
Chicken and rice go together – all the way to the origins of domestic fowl in grain fields.
Science News discusses two new studies that place the origins of domestic chickens in one specific place – Southeast Asia – and much more recently […]
Science Art: Yearly Potato Production, from Natural History Magazine, March 1947.
In 1947, Natural History Magazine took a deep dive into potatoes – where they came from and where they’re going … and growing. The story […]
Self-driving tractor ready for remote-control farming.
CNet reports on John Deere’s invention of an autonomous robot tractor you can control with your smartphone: “It takes a while to get comfortable because […]
African farmers use bee hives as elephant-proof fences.
Scientific American looks at scientific Kenyans, who have taken advantage of one of the few things elephants are actually afraid of – stinging honeybees – […]
Wild bees do $1.5 billion-worth of pollinating for six crops alone.
Science News looks beyond the domesticated honeybee for unsung pollination heroes: the bumblebees, mason bees, carpenter bees and other native bees that do an enormous […]
Old coffee is coming back to save the business (and the species tastes great, too)
The Scientist toasts the rediscovery of Coffea stenophylla, a relative of the C. arabica coffee plant our society runs on – that’s proved itself able […]
Substituting soap-bubble robots for pollinating insects.
Cell reveals a potential replacement for pollinators – the vital insects who keep plants from almonds to corn to quinoa reproducing – by using flying […]
Science Art: Genesee County Hogs of the “Swill-Pail Breed,” from Moore’s Rural New-Yorker, March 22, 1862
Click to embiggen Swill-pail hogs from upstate New York, as featured on the front page of Moore’s Rural New-Yorker, a delightful paper that promised “Agriculture, […]
EPA approves a fungicide distributed *by bees*.
Growing Produce has a story that strikes me as super weird, about the first-ever commercial fungicide designed to be carried onto crops by bees: The […]