California wheat farmers could maintain their yields and improve soil health by growing annual wheat without tilling the soil year after year. This strategy could encourage farmers to adopt a sustainable practice commonly called conservation tillage, no-till or minimum-till cultivation.
Ana Zepeda has received a $7,300-grant to help women in southern Mexico plant a community garden, intended to provide better nutrition for their children and keep them in school.
Zepeda developed the project as part of her doctoral dissertation in the lab of Amanda Crump, and she’ll start the work later this year. The grant, from the UC Davis Advancing Sustainable Development Goals program, furthers the university’s commitment to support development at home and around the world.
China’s small-scale rice farmers hold the key to both feeding their nation and reducing nitrogen pollution by 2030, benefiting soil, water and air quality and slowing climate change. A research team, including Cameron Pittelkow of the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences, has published a strategy for how to do that, in the March 2 edition of Nature.
The University of California, Davis, recently announced that philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick, co-owners of The Wonderful Company, have pledged the largest gift ever to the university by individual donors. The $50 million pledge will support the school’s longstanding commitment to address today’s most pressing challenges in agriculture and environmental sustainability.
Reducing agricultural nitrogen (N) losses remains a key challenge in achieving more sustainable food systems. A recent global analysis by researchers at UC Davis and the Environmental Defense Fund quantified nitrate (NO3) leaching losses in agricultural fields in response to changes in N balance (N inputs minus N outputs). Led by Dr.
Sorghum is an earthy, nutty, gluten-free grain that boasts remarkable drought tolerance. It also poses serious potential as a sustainable crop in a warming world.
It has been proposed that ecosystem service markets – an economic model that encourages ecological conservation and regeneration by establishing a supply-and-demand market for things like water and biodiversity – are the solution for sustainable food systems on rangelands. Despite this conceptual argument, these market types have failed to emerge.