A research team has developed PlantCaFo, an advanced few-shot plant disease recognition model powered by foundation models, capable of achieving high accuracy with only a handful of training images.

Corn is one of the most valuable cash crops globally, with annual grain production in the United States alone valued at nearly $80 billion. Fungicides are widely used to protect crops and promote yield, but new research published in Phytobiomes Journal suggests we may be overlooking a hidden cost: the loss of beneficial fungi essential to plant health.

A new critical review, published in the journal CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, highlights the emergence and scientific basis of regenerative agriculture – proposing a working definition centred on ecological cycles and farm system outcomes.

Dr Nicholas Bardsley, author of the paper from the Department of Agri-Food Economics and Marketing at the University of Reading, suggests that as global agriculture faces intensifying soil degradation, climate disruption, and ecological breakdown, there is a need for a deeper re-evaluation of how food is produced and what it means to farm regeneratively.