During the months that Jonathan Malacarne spent traveling from village to village in rural Mozambique, the weather could be dry and dusty or soaking wet from heavy rain. Either way, people from the community would walk and ride bikes from miles away to meet under the shade of a tree or in a classroom to learn about insured maize seeds.

UC Davis recently joined a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to bring agricultural expertise and training from four American land-grant universities to agricultural universities in Egypt.

The five-year, $30 million project will establish a Center of Excellence for Agriculture at Cairo University. The goal is to equip faculty and students with the tools to make an impact as research scientists, employees, policymakers and innovators in Egyptian agriculture.

(Originally published in Ag Alert and courtesy of the California Farm Bureau Federation)

A researcher from the University of California, Davis, is seeking to commercialize equipment that could be used as an early warning device to detect a deadly disease in citrus long before trees show signs of infection.

The new year will bring next-level greenhouses to the University of California, Davis, where faculty and students are conducting innovative research to keep plants plentiful, nutritious and resilient. 

(Originally published in the fall/winter 2018-19 issue of UC Davis Magazine)

Romaine lettuce and leafy greens contaminated with E. coli. Eggs, raw chicken or turkey exposed to salmonella. Given frequent reports of food recalls, consumers may believe contaminations are on the rise in the United States.

Farmers spend a lot of time and money controlling weeds and other pests, and often have to turn to chemical fumigants to keep the most destructive pests at bay. Farmers also wrestle with what to do with low-value byproducts of crop production, such as skin, seeds and hulls from fruit, vegetable and nut processing.

What if those agricultural waste streams could generate alternatives to chemical fumigants and make farming more productive, profitable and environmentally friendly?

Plant biologists at the University of California, Davis, have discovered a way to make crop plants replicate through seeds as clones. The discovery, long sought by plant breeders and geneticists, could make it easier to propagate high-yielding, disease-resistant or climate-tolerant crops and make them available to the world’s farmers. 

The researchers published their findings Dec. 12 in the journal Nature. 

UC Davis recently boosted its agricultural research capabilities with major irrigation infrastructure improvements on 300 acres just west of Highway 113. The upgrades include five miles of new underground PVC piping, a pumping and filtering station and state-of-the-art control technology.

If you were to take a seed and zap it into the future to see how it will respond to climate change, how realistic might that prediction be? After all, seeds that actually grow in the future will have gone through generations of genetic changes and adaptations that these “time traveling” seeds don’t experience.

While clearing out your garden this fall, there’s no need for it to remain a blank, empty space until spring. If you have a year-round growing season, you can grow winter veggies and flowers, of course. But you can also add cover crops to your garden that improve the soil while you basically sit back and “watch the grass grow” –or the peas, clover and barley.