A team of scientists, including Gail Taylor of the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, has identified a gene in poplar trees that enhances photosynthesis and can boost tree height by as much as 200 percent. Discovery of the “Booster” gene has enormous potential for both the nation’s efforts to create plant-based jet fuel and to boost the yield of key food crops.
Steam treatment of soil offers growers a viable alternative to chemicals and a money-saver for organic farmers. It also benefits farm laborers by reducing their exposure to potential harm, said graduate student Erika Escalona. She is assessing the impacts on weeds, soil-borne disease and the soil biome of steam treatments used to disinfest lettuce and spinach fields in the Salinas Valley.
That's the key takeaway from a recent paper published by a team that included Leslie Roche, an associate professor of Cooperative Extension in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. The paper describes those challenges, how farmers are confronting them and what should come next.
Two UC Davis collaborative projects aim to enlarge the share of that wealth for small farmers in Colombia. Undergraduate students from the Department of Plant Sciences played host to five students from Colombia recently, after themselves visiting Colombia last year to study that country’s cultivation of this ancient and storied crop.
Construction officially began on the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Center for Agricultural Innovation with a groundbreaking event on May 29, celebrating the future $64.4 million facility at the University of California, Davis.
California wheat farmers could maintain their yields and improve soil health by growing annual wheat without tilling the soil year after year. This strategy could encourage farmers to adopt a sustainable practice commonly called conservation tillage, no-till or minimum-till cultivation.
Ana Zepeda has received a $7,300 grant to help women in southern Mexico plant a community garden. The garden is intended to provide better nutrition for their children and keep them in school.
China’s small-scale rice farmers hold the key to both feeding their nation and reducing nitrogen pollution by 2030, benefiting soil, water and air quality and slowing climate change. A research team, including Cameron Pittelkow of the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, has published a strategy for how to do that, in the March 2 edition of Nature.
The University of California, Davis, recently announced that philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick, co-owners of The Wonderful Company, have pledged the largest gift ever to the university by individual donors. The $50 million pledge will support the school’s longstanding commitment to address today’s most pressing challenges in agriculture and environmental sustainability.
Reducing agricultural nitrogen (N) losses remains a key challenge in achieving more sustainable food systems. A recent global analysis by researchers at UC Davis and the Environmental Defense Fund quantified nitrate (NO3) leaching losses in agricultural fields in response to changes in N balance (N inputs minus N outputs). Led by Dr.
