Did you know that the leaves of the sweet potato plant can be eaten as a leafy green vegetable? Lauren Howe, a graduate student in Plant Sciences at UC Davis, worked on a project with farmers in Ethiopia this summer, in conjunction with the Horticulture Innovation Lab at UC Davis. Watch the Horticulture Innovation Lab’s…
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A USDA grant will allow a group of California organic farmers to team up with researchers from the University of California, Chico State and Fresno State to determine whether tilling less soil on the farm will improve production of vegetable crops. The aim is to duplicate the soil environment found in natural areas — typically…
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Photosynthesis is one of the most crucial life processes on earth. It’s how plants get their food, using energy from sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide from the air into sugars. It’s long been thought that more than 30 percent of the energy produced during photosynthesis is wasted in a process called photorespiration. A…
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Gurdev Khush, a world-renowned plant geneticist, is the recipient of the UC Davis Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovation for his truly extraordinary leadership in developing rice strains that have enhanced the quality and quantity of global rice supplies. The award recognizes an acknowledged innovator whose career accomplishments include innovations that have led to a long-term…
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POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT Assistant/Associate Professor of Crop Improvement for Human and Animal Nutrition Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis The Department of Plant Sciences in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis, is recruiting an Assistant/Associate Professor of Crop Improvement with an emphasis on improving the nutritional quality…
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The Food and Agriculture: A Global Conversation symposium will take place on April 24, 2018, at UC Davis. The conference will bring together leaders in academia, industry, and the media to provide participants with scientific information about agriculture, nutrition, and food security. It will spark collaborations between attendees that will enhance the public discourse of scientific issues. The symposium…
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Your body plays host to a microbial ecosystem that’s ever-evolving, and its composition has implications for your overall health. The same holds true for plants and their microbiomes and the relationship is of pivotal importance to agriculture. In a paper appearing in PLOS Biology, Joseph Edwards, ’17 Ph.D. in Plant Biology, Professor Venkatesan Sundaresan, departments…
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Farmers make a lot of decisions. One of the most important is how much fertilizer to apply to their crops, and when to apply it. Applying more than necessary or at the wrong time can waste resources, impact the environment, and cut into narrow profits. The answer could lie in a small handheld device. A…
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Important work happening in the Capital Region is transforming the future of vegetables. Inside the Seed Biotechnology Center at UC Davis, Dr. Allen Van Deynze points out the progress of the genome sequencing of Moringa oleifera — a colorful stream of data points shows on his computer screen. The moringa tree is an important source…
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Bambara groundnut. Drumstick tree. Apple-ring tree. While many have never heard of these crops, they produce nutrition essential in Africa. To help improve the benefit brought by these and other little-studied crops, Dow AgroSciences teamed up with the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) and the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC). The organization is working…
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