Conservation tillage reduces the physical movement of soil to the minimum required for crop establishment and production. When consistently practiced as a soil and crop management system, it greatly reduces soil erosion and is recognized for the potential to improve soil quality and water conservation and plant available water. Adoption of conservation tillage increased dramatically with the ad...

This is a brief report on a model study of how production systems in two regions of Norway are affected by expected climate change, and how these soil-plant ecosystems functions as reactors in the climate system. A cluster of models simulating heat and water transport, plant growth, soil Cand N-transformations and transport have been run based on historical weather and weather generated by dyna...

Genetically modified herbicide resistant (GMHR) crops have seriously affected the increase of food production. GMHR events are used on >80% 160 million estimated hectares of transgenic crops grown annually across 29 countries. GMHR traits encompass five events, including two transgenes code for glyphosate resistance and insensitive 5enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase (EPSPS), the cp4 eps...

Advances in biotechnology have led to development and commercialization of several herbicide-resistant crops (HRCs) in the mid-1990s. HRCs survive herbicide treatment that previously would have killed the crop along with targetted weeds. Both transgenic (created through stable integration of a foreign gene) and non-transgenic (developed through traditional plant breeding) HRCs are commercially ...

Risk assessments of new insect-resistant crops will need to estimate the potential for increased weediness of wild crop relatives as a consequence of gene flow. When field experiments are precluded by containment concerns, simulation experiments can identify hazards or measure expected differences between GMOs and parental plants. To measure plant fitness consequences of wild plant protection f...

The term 'Workers' Councils' can perhaps stand as a catchall title for an unpremeditated, quasi-spontaneous, 'groundup' organisational form reproduced over many periods and across many countries by groups of workers previously unaware of such a structure or of its historical precedents. Its highest form the Soviet, its 'lowest' the simple workplace representatives' committee, this formation rec...

As new herbicide-resistant crops come to market, it can be assumed that there will be a dramatic increase in use of 2,4-D and dicamba. Weed resistance could follow suit, and so a better understanding of the mechanism is urgently needed. In this issue of Journal of Experimental Botany (pages 3223–3235), Goggin et al. report on their analysis of 2,4-D resistance in wild radish. An elegant combina...

AFTER centuries of improving crop plants by breeding for desirable traits, agricultural scientists are now using the tools of molecular biology and genetic engineering to develop transgenic plants with the desired genes. Enormous progress has been made over the past decade in our understanding of the highly complex molecular events that occur in plant–pathogen interactions. This knowledge in tu...

With a projected population of 10 billion by 2050, an immediate priority for agriculture is to achieve increased crop yields in a sustainable and cost-effective way. The concept of using a transgenic approach was realized in the mid-1990s with the commercial introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops. By 2010, the global value of the seed alone was US $11.2 billion, with commercial biotech...