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Television crews stand outside the Global Seed Vault before the opening ceremony in Longyearbyen February 26, 2008. Credit: Reuters/Bob Strong

(Reuters) – A "doomsday" vault storing crop seeds in an Arctic deep freeze is surpassing 500,000 samples to become the most diverse collection of food seeds in history, managers said on Thursday.

Set up on the Norwegian [...]

Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering mustard plant, normally reproduces sexually. But Jean Philippe Vielle-Calzada and his colleagues have show that silencing a protein called Argonaute 9 causes the plant to begin reproducing asexually instead. The blue shading shows the area involved in gamete formation that is disrupted when Argonaute 9 is silenced. (Credit: Jean Philippe [...]

A wild bison and her eight-day-old calf are seen at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge outside Denver August 6, 2009. Credit: Reuters/U.S. Forest Service

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The federal government will maximize enrollment in the land-idling Conservation Reserve, said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a policy that would reduce U.S. cropland by 1.5 percent if [...]

ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2010) — In the last fifty years, the Philippines has more than tripled its rice yield, while the world average rice yield has increased only about 2.3 times.

Despite being criticized as a poor rice producer because of its status as the world's biggest rice importer, the Philippines has actually done remarkably well [...]

Simulation of bean root systems showing how altered root growth angles lead to deep or shallow soil exploration. (Credit: Jonathan Lynch, Penn State)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 23, 2010) — Root systems are the basis of the second Green Revolution, and the focus on beans and corn that thrive in poor growing conditions will help some of the [...]

Researchers say that higher temperatures could significantly reduce yields of wheat, rice and maize – dietary staples for tens of millions of poor people who subsist on less than $1 a day. (Credit: Courtesy of David Lobell)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 20, 2010) — The impact of global warming on food prices and hunger could be large over [...]

Agricultural Research Service scientists have developed a more affordable method to safely and reliably mark termites and other insects so their movements can be tracked over vast acreage. (Credit: Photo courtesy of USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 18, 2010) — An Agricultural Research Service (ARS)-developed method to safely and reliably mark termites and other insects [...]

ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2010) — The drivers of tropical deforestation have shifted in the early 21st century to hinge on growth of cities and the globalized agricultural trade, a new large-scale study concludes. The observations starkly reverse assumptions by some scientists that fast-growing urbanization and the efficiencies of global trade might eventually slow or reverse [...]

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists and their colleagues at the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute have announced that they have completed sequencing the genome of a kind of wild grass that will enable researchers to shed light on the genetics behind hardier varieties of wheat and improved [...]

Plant pathologist Martin Carson (left) and technician Jerry Ochocki inspect crown rust infections on common buckthorn, an alternate host. Multiple varieties of oats are planted between rows of infected buckthorn to determine which varieties can resist crown rust. (Credit: Photo by Stephen Ausmus)

ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2010) — Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists are tapping into [...]