Drones in the Sky: Towards a More Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable Agriculture: More than One Way Ahead

Recent discussions of the way ahead for agriculture have tended to centre around the frequently incompatible claims of the proponents of technological agriculture, now further developed through inputs from biotechnology , and ecological agriculture, of which organic farming is the best known example.There is a need for the claims made for these two versions to be put into a broader scientific a...

Tools Towards Managing Mycorrhiza for Sustainable Agriculture

The arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, in concert with other soil dwelling microorganisms such as the so-called “plant growth promoting rhizobacteria”, play a pivotal role for natural soil fertility and stability, hence, for sustainable crop production. Appropriate management of the AM fungal community is crucial, especially in the tropics where the cultivated soils are notoriously fragile and ...

Towards Sustainable Agriculture: Challenges and Opportunities

The environmental impact of agriculture cannot be ignored. In many countries, as much as 70 per cent of the land area is in agricultural use. Over a third of the global agricultural land area is in high-intensity, continuous cropping systems that use high levels of agrochemicals and reshape land and waterways. The rest is under such a farming system that uses far fewer inputs, but requires rela...

The Pfam protein families database: towards a more sustainable future

In the last two years the Pfam database (http://pfam.xfam.org) has undergone a substantial reorganisation to reduce the effort involved in making a release, thereby permitting more frequent releases. Arguably the most significant of these changes is that Pfam is now primarily based on the UniProtKB reference proteomes, with the counts of matched sequences and species reported on the website res...

Sustainable intensification in agriculture