The University of Washington and partners conducted a study with farmers using regenerative farming practices to analyze their impact on the nutritional content of food. The results are published in PeerJ. Regenerative farming practices include no-till, use of cover crops, and diverse rotations to conserve biodiversity. To document evidence on the impact of regenerative farming to food, ten farms in the US grew one acre of a test crop for five years, which was compared with the same crop planted on a nearby farm using conventional agriculture.

RUC Davis graduate student, Kevin Yates, together with his professors, developed a GM lettuce that produces a fusion protein combining PTH with part of a human antibody protein. The fusion protein is engineered to be unchanging in the bloodstream. Being able to plant and extract the drug will be beneficial to astronauts in long spaceflights to save weight and get a fresh source of drugs. Conventional medicines usually have a short shelf life and thus astronauts would need ways to replenish their supplies during long spaceflights.

With global prices of food and fertilizers already reaching worrying highs, the continuing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raise serious concerns for food security, both in the short and long term. CGIAR Senior Research Fellows Joseph Glauber and David Laborde from IFPRI are curating a special series of posts providing analysis on the implications of rising food and fertilizer prices

A  recent Twitter conversation between the UN’s David Beasley and Tesla’s Elon Musk has shown that hunger is deceptively complex. There is a crucial difference between acute hunger, caused by shocks like war or natural disasters, and chronic hunger, which occurs when agricultural production (and distribution) fails to keep pace with threats such as soil degradation, erratic rainfall, or heatwaves, or when poverty renders food unaffordable.

Below our feet lies a hidden treasure. It may be hundreds of metres below. Or it may be so close to the ground that it bubbles up to the surface. This unseen treasure is groundwater: namely, the vast reservoirs of fresh water under the ground. It sustains ecosystems and provides food, drink and livelihoods for billions. As climate patterns change with global heating, this reliable water source is becoming ever more important for food security and livelihoods.

Amundson’s letter (1) in response to our recent article (2) suggests that there are substantial challenges to the technologies that we envisioned being promising and/or needed to make the agricultural sector net negative. Aside from the difficulty in implementation, he makes no technical criticism of the findings.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is releasing new guidelines on abortion care today, in a bid to protect the health of women and girls and help prevent over 25 million unsafe abortions that currently occur each year. “Being able to obtain safe abortion is a crucial part of health care,” said Craig Lissner, acting Director for Sexual and Reproductive Health and Research at WHO. “Nearly every death and injury that results from unsafe abortion is entirely preventable.

Anyone familiar with the combination of ‘biological material’ (high yielding varieties and hybrids), ‘water’ (assured irrigation), and ‘chemical inputs’ (fertilizers and plant protection chemicals) as the key to success in irrigated agriculture will be gullible to use the same principles for improving farming in the dryland ecosystems. The solutions to improving livelihoods in drylands, however, are far more complex and multifaceted.

Interested in natural cosmetic products, ones that support local communities and don’t deplete our natural resources? You aren’t alone! Growing consumer interest in the environmental and ethical credentials of cosmetics has spurred interest in sustainably- and ethically-sourced beauty products, which include many forest products, also known as non-wood forest products (NWFPs). 

 

The African BioGenome Project (AfricaBP) aims to sequence the genomes of more than 100,000 African endemic species. It is an effort by African scientists to safeguard African biodiversity while bringing genomics and bioinformatics capacities closer to the African people. The project, which involves more than 100 African scientists from five African Union regions and 22 African organizations, intends to sequence the genomes of African plant, animal, fungus, protist, and other eukaryotic species.