Many plants die when they don't get enough water. Friederike Kögler has found a way to prevent this. She found out that plants can be trained like athletes. In her experiments she used targeted water stress to make corn plants get by with little water and still grow. In September last year, the doctoral student was awarded the Ernst Knapp Future Prize for this finding. 

Earthworms are not everyone's cup of tea. But the small animals living in the soil have their virtues: they loosen up the soil and thus ensure better water and nutrient uptake by the plants growing there. On their way through the soil, they also consume huge amounts of organic material, which is ultimately excreted as humus. NOKE founder Michael Quintern took advantage of the characteristics of these natural soil conditioners.

The Danish plant physiologist Tonni Grube Andersen is one of this year's winners of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. With the award money of 1.65 million euros, he is setting up his own research group at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. Andersen is particularly interested in how plants interact underground with their surrounding root microbes. Tonni Andersen moved to the University of Lausanne in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow with a Marie Curie fellowship.

No other country in Europe produces as much packaging waste: With 230 kilograms per inhabitant in 2017, Germany is the front-runner. Innovative solutions are needed to reduce the use of plastic packaging in particular. This is where the "Innoredux" joint project comes in, supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with EUR 1.5 million. Under the leadership of Frieder Rubik, partners from science, industry and municipalities are testing innovative business models to reduce plastic waste.

The German Livestock Association umbrella organization for the production of cattle and pigs in Germany. Within the association, the Förderverein Bioökonomieforschung e.V. (FBF) deals with modern breeding research and insemination. The research activities are supported by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and the Federal Ministry of Research, among others. The veterinarian Jens Baltissen is the provisional managing director of the FBF and explains which traits are in the focus for breeding dairy cows now and in future.