Agriculture
A robot could save farmers from being buried alive in grain
The Grain Weevil robot helps farmers manage stored grain, keeping them out of bins where they might lose their lives to grain entrapment.
Disease-resistant banana created with CRISPR
African scientists have used CRISPR to create a disease-resistant banana that is indistinguishable from unmodified plants.
Antidote saved 100% of bees from lethal pesticide
Beehives are under threat from common insecticides. But researchers created pollen-like microparticles to deliver an antidote.
Yuan Longping: His rice helped feed the world
Scientist Yuan Longping's hybrid rice helped feed the world. His wild rice discoveries and hybrid rice inventions in the 1960s and 1970s helped alleviate food scarcity across Asia and Africa.
"Hands-free" smart farm will replace laborers with robots
At a smart farm in Australia, robots and AI will do all the manual labor, potentially foreshadowing agriculture’s "hands-free" future.
Microfarm startup brings fresh produce to food desert
California startup Crop Swap LA has planted a “microfarm” in an LA resident’s front yard and is now distributing the crops throughout the local community.
CRISPR could save billions of baby chicks before they hatch
Male chicks are killed as soon as they hatch, in a gruesome process called chick culling. Gene editing could save them.
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Hard Reset
Vertical farms could take over the world
Vertical farming saves water, land, and energy — and it could be how we grow food on Mars.
The world’s first fully electric, self-driving tractor
Monarch Tractor’s all-electric, self-driving tractor could save farmers money, while also benefiting the environment.
“Phytomining” trees can extract metal from the Earth
Phytomining, a technique that uses trees to soak the metals out of contaminated soil, could offer new ways to mine for metals that are more sustainable than the existing, environmentally destructive methods.