EurekAlert! News by Subject: Agriculture - News by Subject: Agriculture

Agriculture

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 23-Dec-2025 19:11 ET (24-Dec-2025 00:11 GMT/UTC)

4-Nov-2025

Foxtail barley serves as a host for fungal pathogens attacking barley

American Phytopathological Society
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported that foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum), a wild relative of cultivated barley, can harbor several fungal pathogens and may play a role in the disease epidemiology of barley.

Journal: Plant Disease
Funder: University of Minnesota, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, American Malting Barley Association

4-Nov-2025

UTIA faculty member leads International Society of Arboriculture

University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture
Grant and Award Announcement

University of Tennessee Professor Sharon Jean-Philippe became board president of the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) at the organization’s annual conference in Christchurch, New Zealand, in October. She will serve as president through August 2026. ISA promotes the professional practice of arboriculture and fosters worldwide awareness of tree benefits.

4-Nov-2025

University of Houston assists in designing robotic hands for use in health, agriculture, manufacturing

University of Houston
Grant and Award Announcement

With NSF support, the University of Houston and a collaborative team of researchers are creating skill-augmented prosthetic hands, drawing from years of study on how people use their hands, to bridge the gap in industry and bring functional dexterity to real-world applications.

4-Nov-2025

A sticky solution for enhanced pesticide deposition

Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers have developed a pesticide delivery method using liquid marbles that stick to plant surfaces instead of bouncing off, reducing pesticide waste and environmental contamination.

Journal: Journal of Colloid and Interface Science

4-Nov-2025

Heatwave predictions months in advance with machine learning: A new study delivers improved accuracy and efficiency

CMCC Foundation - Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change
Peer-Reviewed Publication

With heatwaves among Europe's deadliest climate hazards, a team of scientists led by CMCC has developed a prediction system capable of providing helpful information 4 to 7 weeks before summer, which gives valuable time to improve preparedness.

Trained on data from centuries of climate analysis up to recent years, the machine learning system has demonstrated an increase in forecast efficiency by drastically reducing the computational resources required, making these techniques accessible to a broader number of researchers and institutions.

Journal: Communications Earth & Environment

4-Nov-2025

Depletion of Ukraine’s soils threatens long-term global food security

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Beyond the disruption to Ukraine’s food exports, the war is jeopardising the country’s long-term ability to remain the ‘breadbasket of Europe’, because its soils are gradually losing vital crop nutrients. That is the warning issued by researchers from the UK, Ukraine and the Netherlands who say more nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium* are now being removed from soils via harvested crops than added back in. This is due to reduced access to fertilisers during the war and inefficient farming practices. Military activity has also exacerbated existing degradation and erosion of soils across Ukraine.

Journal: Communications Earth & Environment
Funder: UN Environment Programme

4-Nov-2025

AI breakthrough in agriculture: ChatLD uses language models to diagnose crop diseases without training data

Nanjing Agricultural University The Academy of Science
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A research team has developed ChatLeafDisease (ChatLD) — a training-free crop disease classification framework built on the GPT-4o large language model (LLM) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting.

Journal: Plant Phenomics