Science News
More than 2.4 million miles of energy pipelines crisscross the United States. If assembled end-to-end, they would circle the Earth almost 100 times!
Energy pipelines transport products such as crude oil or natural gas. Some of the pipelines are above ground, but most of them are buried. Often, energy pipelines pass through previously undisturbed areas. These areas need to be managed carefully to re-establish ecologically functioning systems. This complex process is called land reclamation.
Warren Dick has worked with gypsum for more than two decades. You’d think he’d be an expert on drywall and plastering because both are made from gypsum. But the use of gypsum that Dick studies might be unfamiliar to you: on farmland.
Modern agriculture’s large monoculture fields grow a lot of corn and soybeans, planted annually. The outputs from row crops can be measured both in dollars paid in the market and also in non-market costs, known as externalities. Soil, nutrients, groundwater, pollinators, wildlife diversity, and habitat (among other things) can be lost when crop yields are maximized.
Now it appears that prairie strips have an extraordinary power to change this pattern.
More than 750 million people don’t get enough nutrients from their food. More than two-thirds of those people live in places that consume a lot of rice. Can rice bred for extra protein be the answer?
“There are hundreds of millions of people around the world who depend on rice and eat it three times a day, but their access to protein is very limited by availability and cost,” explains Herry Utomo, a professor at Louisiana State University. “High-protein rice can be used to help solve the worldwide problem across social, cultural, and economic issues.”
Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. That’s certainly true for nitrogen fertilizers.
Without enough nitrogen, crops don’t grow well. Yields are reduced significantly.
Applying too much nitrogen fertilizer, on the other hand, can hurt the environment. Nitrogen can enter the watershed, polluting aquatic ecosystems. Microbes can also convert the excess nitrogen into nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas implicated in climate change.
In the early 1990s, Acton Lake in southwestern Ohio had a muddy problem. Large amounts of sediment from nearby farms were entering the lake’s watershed. These sediments traveled through streams draining the landscape and were filling up the lake.
So, the USDA gave local farmers incentives to change some of their farming practices. One of these practices was conservation tillage, in which the soil is plowed less often. That can reduce sediment runoff.
The beloved peanut usually grows in sandy soil where there might not be much moisture. But some varieties of peanut perform better in drought than others. They use less water when there isn’t much to go around, and remain productive as drought deepens. Crop scientists are trying to find the peanut varieties best at it.
Thomas Sinclair at North Carolina State University and colleagues are studying peanut varieties to find a ‘water conservation’ trait. It would help the plant maintain a high yield during a drought.
Fire and water. Timeless, opposing forces, they are actually linked in powerful ways that can have major impacts on communities and ecosystems.
Rice is a staple food crop of 20 percent of the world’s population. It’s also grown on every continent except Antarctica.
When you think of China, do you think of potatoes? Maybe not, but in the Loess Plateau region of northwestern China, potato is the main food crop.