Crops & Food
We eat to live. Humans use approximately 11% of Earth’s land for the cultivation of crops for food, but also for clothing, medicine and biofuels. Globally, major crops include sugarcane, pumpkin, maize (corn), wheat, rice, cassava, soybeans, hay, potatoes and cotton.
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
Gene-edited crops that ‘communicate with environment’ could launch next green revolution
Researchers at the Institute of Network Biology in Germany and their colleagues .... published a study in Nature showing that ...
Next Impossible Burger? Investors pour $1.4 billion into lab-grown meat, microbial protein development
Hoping to find the next Beyond Meat, venture investors have more than doubled their bets on alternative protein makers this ...
Video: Debating Europe’s pro-organic Farm to Fork Green Deal—Sustainable agriculture or recipe for disaster?
One of the unpleasant lessons of the COVID pandemic is how little prepared we’ve been for an event that was, ...
Viewpoint: Red meat increases cancer risk? Maybe, but staying healthy isn’t as simple as avoiding steak
Summer is a great time to grill steaks and hamburgers…they were definitely featured in our Fourth of July BBQ! We ...
What’s the future of GMOs in Europe? Global food security in the midst of COVID. Watch Webinar Wed Jul 29, 10AM ET w/Sonny Perdue and Jon Entine
If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it's that we can't take food security for granted. As the "heart ...
Preventing spread of parasites, not cutting pesticide use, key to protecting bees
For as long as beekeeping records have been kept, 1,100 years, there have been accounts of colony collapse disorder. Just ...
Agricultural technology key to protecting nature and preventing pandemics
Scientists are urging governments across the globe to adopt technology to reduce agriculture’s impact on the environment and slow the ...
GMO ‘halo effect’: How biotech crops benefit farmers who don’t grow them
Agricultural Economist Graham Brookes of PG Economics is the latest featured expert in the ISAAA Webinar series. His talk focused ...
Viewpoint: Pesticides on produce aren’t dangerous. Ignore the ‘Dirty Dozen’ and eat more fruits and veggies
A uniquely frightening time like this provides a great moment for us all to do what’s best for neighbors, employees, ...
Bayer launches carbon capture program to support ‘eco-friendly’ farming
Bayer AG launched a pilot program in the United States and Brazil on [July 21] that will pay farmers for ...
Viewpoint: Busting nutrition myths—Why you don’t have to cut potatoes out of your diet
“Stop cutting out white potatoes – they're as healthy as sweet ones, dietitians say,” a recent headline in Insider urges us ...
CRISPR could yield cyanide-free cassava, helping protect health of a billion people
“Roughly a billion people around the world rely on cassava as a source of calories, including around 40 percent of ...
Filipino farmer: Growing GMO crops ‘changed my life completely’
Ryan Lising, a biotech corn farmer from Magalang, Pampanga said that planting biotech corn changed his life completely. Before planting ...
Flood-proof crops? Plants engineered to grow taller may survive unstable environments
Stature matters to plants. Short crops can carry more grain without bending under their own weight—a key trait that helped ...
Over 90 percent of US corn, cotton and soybean produced from GMO crops, latest USDA data show
Genetically Engineered (GE) seeds were commercially introduced in the United States for major field crops in 1996, with adoption rates ...
KFC developing world’s first bioprinted chicken nuggets for planned rollout in Russia in fall 2020
KFC is taking the next step in its innovative concept of creating a “restaurant of the future” by launching the ...
Video: Burger King’s lemon-grass fed eco-Whopper not backed by evidence, animal scientist says
On [July 14], Burger King launched promotions for its new “eco-friendly” Whopper, burgers made from cattle that have been fed ...
Growing fish in space: Lab-grown tuna could feed astronauts of the future
.... [S]ending items into space is extremely expensive—about $10,000 a pound. Space dwellers will need to find a way to ...
Where did strawberries comes from? Genomics, art history help trace evolution of fruits and vegetables
Plant geneticists seeking to understand the history of the plants we eat can decode the genomes of ancient crops from ...
Low-carb diets might help treat Alzheimer’s, ALS—and even cancer?
[T]here is a growing interest in [Ketogenic] extreme high-fat diet among researchers. In 2019 alone, more than a thousand new ...
African women are leading biotechnology advance across the continent
Women researchers are strongly influencing the adoption of agricultural biotechnology in Africa. “As African women, we are the ones who ...
Biotechnology gives plant breeders a leg up in ‘evolutionary arms race’ against crop diseases
While crop pests and diseases can be spread by environmental factors, such as the wind, they also move into new ...
USDA proposes measures to crack down on fraud in organic farming
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) proposes amending the USDA organic regulations to strengthen oversight ...
Antioxidant-rich corn could mitigate symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease, study finds
Flavonoids from a specific line of corn act as anti-inflammatory agents in the guts of mice with an inflammatory-bowel-disease-like condition, ...
Food crops engineered to behave like drought-tolerant succulents may better adapt to climate change
“Water-storing tissue is one of the most successful adaptations in plants that enables them to survive long periods of drought ...
US GMO crop cultivation accelerates as farmers gain access to more biotech seeds
[Editor's note: GMO crops were widely adopted by US farmers after their initial approval in 1996. According to a new ...
European Food Safety Authority rebuffs activist criticism of its safety assessment of insect and herbicide resistant GMO crops
The Risk “Assessment of genetically engineered organisms in the EU and Switzerland” (RAGES) project (2016‐2019) evaluated the risk assessment of ...
GMO insect-resistant Bt prevents cancer and saves farmers up to $167 million per year, study shows
Previous field studies have reached no collective consensus on whether Bt corn, the most commonly planted transgenic crop worldwide, has ...
