Agricultural and Forestry Science

Nicotine isn’t all bad, despite its addictive qualities and its presence in tobacco products, increasingly taboo in these health-conscious times. As a chemical compound, nicotine even has beneficial properties. It’s used around the world as a relatively cheap, environmentally friendly insecticide, repelling bugs that attack tobacco and other plants, and – contrary to popular misconceptions – it is not a carcinogen.

Take a nicotine molecule and snip off a methyl group, though, and y

Global Environment Facility Funds New UNEP Poverty-Busting Project Promising New Hope to People and Wildlife

A pioneering new project to heal dying and degraded lands fringing Africa`s mighty deserts was launched today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

The project, marking a new phase of the five year-old Desert Margins Programme, has numerous aims including conserving the rich and uni

A new computer program devised by British physicists can quickly spot tiny beetles, rodent droppings and ergot (a poisonous mould) in grain destined for flour and bread manufacture. The researchers reveal details of their work today in the Institute of Physics journal Measurement Science and Technology.

Professor Roy Davies and his colleagues in the Machine Vision Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Egham, Surrey, have found they can run their program on a conventional

Genetically modified Bt crops are now widely used in the USA.

These crops contain genes from bacteria that make them toxic to some insect pests. A central concern in regulating these genetically modified crops is the risk of insects evolving resistance to the Bt toxins.

To reduce this risk, the “high dose/refuge” strategy is now being used, in which non-Bt fields (refuges for insect pests) are planted near Bt fields (where there is high dose of toxin).

In the Nove

Texas research shows mid-September success with containerized trees

Most foresters hold to the straight and narrow when it comes to planting pine trees: nursery seedlings go in the ground between Dec. 1 and March 1. Period.

But a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station study is branching out to show that early planting — even as early as mid-September – can give slash pine trees a growing head start towards better survivability, thus faster regrowth on harvested or burnt area

Antibiotics have been used against infectious diseases with great success and have been a part of agriculture for many years. Agricultural uses of antibiotics include the treatment and prevention of diseases in animals and plants and the promotion of growth in food animals. But scientists have long recognized a down side. The concentrated and widespread use of antibiotic agents has resulted in the emergence of drug-resistant organisms, some of which can now survive most commercially available antibio