Plant Science

When you picture a horse, you may imagine it grazing contentedly in a grassy pasture. Grazing lets horses move around naturally outdoors and socialize with other horses. And grass is an easily available, nutritious feed that horses like eating. If you have the land, providing pasture for horses is less costly than buying hay.

Domesticating plants to grow as crops can turn out to be a double-edged scythe.

On the steep farming slopes of China, Bozhi Wu and his research associates are finding ways to improve economic and environmental stability.

Farmers across the world produce between 10 and 13 million tons of field pea every year. That makes it a top legume crop, just behind dry beans and chickpeas.

But as the global climate changes and temperatures continue to rise, heat stress is becoming a major limiting factor for pea cultivation.

Camelina: Have you heard of it? It’s an emerging alternative oilseed crop in parts of the Great Plains.

A new study looks at how three varieties of camelina perform when grown in two different regions within the Great Plains.

The end goal is to find the camelina variety that performs best in each location or environment. Augustine Obour at Kansas State University was the lead author of the paper.

Available cropland, and the growing season, is limited. Strained soils are in need of rejuvenation. Water can be scarce. Yet the world’s nutritional needs continue to grow, along with its population.

Enter the cowpea. A modest but versatile crop, cowpeas may provide an answer to demands on grower resources—and international appetites.

What bean has double the protein of wheat, triple that of rice, and also contains beneficial amino acids, B-vitamins, and micronutrients? The unassuming faba bean, of course. 

Have you ever cut into a potato to find a dark spot or hollow part? Early research shows that these defects are likely the result of calcium deficiencies in the potato -- and that tuber calcium is genetically linked to tuber quality.

Pinto beans are the most common type of bean cultivated in the United States, accounting for more than a third of all edible, dry bean production. Harvesting them, however, has been a complicated ordeal--until now.

If I presented you with a bowl of steaming purple rice, would you eat it?

Most of us are accustomed to white or brown rice as a staple in our diet. But according to plant breeder Anna McClung, we are missing out. “It’s all about what we’re used to,” says McClung. “If what we’ve known is white, uniform rice, that’s what we will want.”