In an elegant study that is the first of its kind, scientists working at USDA’s Henry A Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center used the tools of biotechnology to trace how plants respond to a common organic farming practice – the planting of crops in a hairy vetch (HV) mulch-based system. The study compared the genetic […]
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Using sophisticated statistical techniques and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nutrient database, a team of scientists quantified the degree of nutrient decline in 43 garden crops from 1950 to 1999 (Donald Davis et al., 2005). Their findings are consistent with and reinforce the findings of an earlier study in Great Britain (Anne-Marie Meyer, 1997). All […]
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Over the last forty years nitrogen fertilizer use has increased seven-fold and nearly every acre of intensively farmed, conventional cropland is treated with pesticides. A team of scientists explored the impact of pesticides and other environmental toxicants on symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF) brought about by Rhizobium bacteria (Fox et al., 2007). Their findings were published […]
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