Agriculture sciences

Floods and droughts are presenting increasing challenges for agriculture throughout the world. For many years, therefore, research efforts have been focussed on the search for more resistant plants that can cope with the environmental challenges. "To do this, we need to gain a better understanding of important crop plants such as rice, which is reckoned to be the world's most important source of food," explains Michael Riemann of the Molecular Cell Biology working group at the KIT's Botanical Institute.

The research initiative coordinated by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) aims at quantifying the sensitivity of ecosystem functions and their subsequent ecosystem services to environmental pressures in representative agriculturally dominated landscapes in Europe. The project receives funding within the BiodivERsA/FACCE initiative.

Earlier this year, Monsanto let Swiss agribusiness giant Syngenta slip through its hands. After several rejected takeover attempts, Syngenta eventually agreed to be acquired by Chinese chemical corporation ChemChina for €39bn. Now, Monsanto is apparently on the lookout for new expansion targets.

According to reports by Reuters, sources says that the US company has approached Bayer AG with an interest towards acquiring the German company’s crop science unit. A potential takeover would be worth more than US$30bn, the reports says.

Bayer’s new partner, based in Redmond, Washington is involved in a wide range of space-based enterprises, including asteroid mining. With the new deal, Bayer intends to purchase data from Planetary Resources to create new agricultural products and improve existing ones. The new collaboration will be part of Bayer’s Digital Farming Initiative. Financial details were not disclosed.

In its 81st year, the world’s largest trade fair of its kind has met a record: 1,660 exhibitors from 65 countries are represented this year at the annual event. The Green Week, however, is not just about displaying culinary delights from all over the world; the bioeconomy has also found a firm foothold at the international exhibition. Once again visitors will be convinced at how biobased raw materials are becoming increasingly more common in our daily lives at the specialist trade fair within the Green week for bioeconomy – nature.tec in Hall 4.2.

Over the past ten years, an international team of plant scientists have put great faith in decoding the wheat genome. Now the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC) has announced that that it will be able to present the complete sequence of bread wheat by 2017. The scientists are convinced that the knowledge of the molecular blueprint of the crop will spur the development of new resistant and high-yielding varieties of wheat.

In Germany, the majority of this precious mineral ends up as fertilizer for arable land. A neglected source of phosphate is animal meal, which is produced from slaughterhouse waste and subsequently fed to livestock or incinerated. Now researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF in Magdeburg have developed a new method to recover the important mineral from the animal meal.

The sky farm, or vertical farming, will not only provide the town’s residents with fresh vegetables, the scientists are also developing greenhouses for astronauts in space. As part of their research to build the greenhouses, engineers from DLR have already grown dozens of lettuces under a pink light in a sterilized laboratory. The greenhouses contain combined life-support systems and do not require soil, but hang in the air whilst their roots are constantly sprayed with a solution containing nutrients.

And now, researchers from a wastewater treatment plant in Rotenburg an der Fulda have shown that algae can also clean waste water. The cleaning abilities of algae were demonstrated during the Hessian pilot project “phosphorus removal by microalgae”. The research project has been funded by the Hessian Ministry for the Environment, Climate Change, Agriculture and Consumer Protection together with the public utilities of Rotenburg since 2015 over a two-year period with a total of €620,000.