With the world’s first global inventory of farm animals showing many breeds of African, Asian, and Latin American livestock at risk of extinction, scientists from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) today called for the rapid establishment of genebanks to conserve the sperm and ovaries of key animals critical for the global population’s future survival.

As of late, many uncertainties have been sprouting up in corn production. Researchers and producers have been wondering if precision agricultural technologies can improve crop yield and quality or reduce their variability.

A study of forest cover in El Salvador in the September issue of BioScience presents novel findings on how economic globalization, land policy changes, and monies sent to family members by emigrants have transformed agriculture and stimulated forest regrowth.

This spring farmers responded to the ethanol industry's demand for grain by increasing their corn acreage by 19 percent over last year, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates.

Wheat breeders are working to put a "little muscle" into bread, in addition to helping producers get better yields, said a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station researcher.

A new molecular tool developedby Australian and Japanese researchers is expected to help farmers address what has become one of the major threats to conventional agricultural practices - herbicide resistance.

The environmental consequences of transgenic crops are the focus of numerous investigations, such as the one published in the journal PloS ONE, which was carried out by Cristina Faria and her colleagues, under the supervision of Ted Turlings, professor in chemical ecology at the University of Neuchвtel.

When soils are too acidic, aluminum that is locked up in clay minerals dissolves into the soil as toxic, electrically charged particles called ions, making it hard for most plants to grow. In fact, aluminum toxicity in acidic soils limits crop production in as much as half the world's arable land, mostly in developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.

The routine use of antibiotics in swine production can have unintended consequences, with antibiotic resistance genes sometimes leaking from waste lagoons into groundwater.

Expectations of higher corn prices are leading some farmers to neglect or ignore integrated pest management strategies, and their behavior could undermine the very technologies that sustain them, University of Illinois researchers report today at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston.

Foster Agblevor, associate professor of biological systems engineering, is leading the team of researchers in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (www.cals.vt.edu) at Virginia Tech (www.vt.edu) developing transportable pyrolysis units that will convert poultry litter into bio-oil, providing an economical disposal system while reducing environmental effects and biosecurity issues.

Cattle deaths due to bloat are an economic loss, but the greater cost may come during the early stages of bloat, said a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station researcher at Vernon.