Tag: sustainability
Stepping, rather than jumping, towards sustainability
The director of the WSU Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, Chad Kruger, posed the question, “For farm and food system sustainability, is it possible to shift our existing system in the right direction with small, positive changes or do we actually need to completely redesign our farm and food systems?” I think, with…
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Herbicide Resistant Johnsongrass: Coming soon to a farm near you!
Written by Matt DiLeo Pioneer and K State are jointly releasing a set of new herbicide resistant sorghum varieties, which will incorporate resistance to ALS and FOP herbicides. Ironically, these non-genetically modified varieties invoke one of the classic bogeymen of anti-GM thinkers – herbicide resistant weeds.
Practical Agricultural Development
Written by Matt DiLeo Among plant geneticists, breeders are always held up as the pragmatic experts who know what matters in the Real World. But not all fields perceive breeders this way… Sustainable agriculture was a popular session topic at the tri-societies joint meeting in San Antonio. More specifically, many speakers took pleasure (rightly so) in…
Commercial Perennial Crops?
Written by Matt DiLeo The “perennial grain” story seems to pop up every few months. The basic idea is that perennial crops would have higher yields and lower environmental impacts than their annual kin. The picture on the left explains pretty clearly why – large permanent root systems secure the topsoil, exhaustively scavenge water and…
Climate Change and the Importance of Maintenance Breeding
Written by Matt DiLeo Variety IR8 is the original “Miracle rice” of the 1960s. This carefully-crafted variety has a stunted, semi-dwarf phenotype, which increases it’s harvest index (the proportion of grain biomass to total biomass), and allows it to resist lodging (falling over into the mud), even when heavily fertilized. As with wheat, the creation…
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