AgriTech Review

A new study led by Paul Schulze-Lefert from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, in collaboration with Ricardo F.H. Giehl at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Gatersleben, revealed how Arabidopsis plants adapt their chemical communication with the bacterial root microbiota to maximize the acquisition of bio-unavailable iron from acidic or calcareous soils. The study is now published in Cell.

Researchers have developed ANyWEL, a generalised semantic-modelling framework that converts scientific literature into overall welfare scores for any farmed species and housing system.

A two-year open-air experiment shows that elevated ozone and combined organic-inorganic fertilization both accelerate nitrification in wheat rhizosphere soil, but through distinct mechanisms on different timescales.

A study of Israeli Mediterranean forests finds that mixed tree stands store about 6.1 megagrams more soil carbon per hectare than single-species pine stands, but the extra carbon sits mainly in fast-cycling fractions while long-term storage is capped by soil texture.

Not all ag technology buyers think alike. Understanding adoption styles can help retailers tailor sales strategies and drive results. The post The Demographics of Ag Technology Sales … Simplify and Execute appeared first on CropLife.

A new drone-based study shows that ordinary cameras can map plastic film residues on farmland, while purpose-built short-wave infrared sensors could make soil plastic monitoring unambiguous.

A qualitative study of nine refugee women in Sweden and Germany shows how everyday occupations like bicycling, gardening and volunteering function as tactics of power and resistance within restrictive migration systems.

A new global review reveals that soil nematodes survive Earth's harshest environments through suspended metabolism, opportunistic life histories, and microbe-based food webs, and that climate change threatens them mainly through indirect effects on permafrost, vegetation, and water availability.

Researchers have devised an ensemble-based scheme that jointly updates soil temperature and moisture, turning fleeting satellite land surface temperature observations into lasting improvements in soil, snow, and hydrological simulations.

The threat of cyberattacks against American agriculture and food systems is growing, and Washington State University researchers are helping to lead a call for a national consortium of land-grant universities to study and combat the threat.

A Swiss lysimeter experiment found that non-inversion tillage reduced nitrate leaching by up to 42 percent on some soils during a wet, bare-soil period, suggesting reduced tillage could help protect water quality as winters grow wetter.

A new French study shows that hedgerows shape the species richness, functional traits, and ecosystem services of ant communities in adjacent farmland, with arboreal hedges boosting diversity and shrubby hedges suppressing aphid-related disservices.

A new study reveals that the regulatory protein GacS acts as a master switch in Pseudomonas fluorescens, coordinating antibiotic production against soil competitors and flagellin-driven plant immune signaling that together reshape the rhizosphere microbiome.

The challenge has been compounded by a recent FCC proposal that could ban sales of existing foreign-made drones as well as new models. The post US spray drone market “very much in flux” as firms attempt to navigate evolving landscape, says ASDC appeared first on AgFunderNews.

After nearly ten years of heating a forest soil to one meter's depth, scientists found that unprotected particulate carbon in the subsoil declined sharply while mineral-bound carbon remained stable, revealing which soil carbon pools are truly vulnerable to climate warming.

A new study shows that vermicompost and the root fungus Piriformospora indica promote apple seedling growth largely by enriching Streptomyces actinomycetes in the rhizosphere, with four isolated strains reproducing the benefits on their own.

An eleven-year field experiment in a Spanish organic olive grove shows that the widely used RothC model overestimated soil carbon sequestration rates by up to twofold, with biochar posing the greatest challenges for both measurement and modelling.

A new cybernetic modeling study shows that fast-growing copiotrophic microbes and their interactions with non-degrading neighbors determine whether fresh organic inputs accelerate or suppress the decomposition of complex soil carbon, with a threshold below 10 percent labile matter triggering maximal priming.

A 90-day incubation study of Malaysian tropical soil shows that compost-induced carbon dioxide emissions are driven primarily by shifts in soil pH and available phosphorus rather than by the amount of carbon added, with chicken dung compost producing the highest emissions.

A new commentary argues that vertical farming's energy inefficiency is real but that system-level factors such as urban integration, circular resource use, and hybrid greenhouse models can still make it a valuable complement to conventional horticulture.

New research from China's Northeast black soil region shows that reduced tillage preserves biological soil crusts that boost stable microbial residue carbon by enriching key soil organic carbon fractions.

Plus: Farmer sentiment drops as input prices rise. Again. The post AgriFood Signals: Edonia raises funds to scale spirulina protein, AI agents for restaurants, PepsiCo does VR appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Researchers have built the first harvest scheduling model that directly controls the spatial texture of mature and old-growth boreal forest, keeping managed landscapes close to the patterns produced by natural disturbances.

A new incubation and modelling study shows that the popular two-pool framework of particulate and mineral-associated soil carbon misses a fast-cycling third timescale, and that transfer rates into the most persistent pool control how long carbon truly stays in soil.

A study of Thai multibreed dairy cattle shows genomic data can offset moderate pedigree gaps, but evaluation accuracy and ranking stability collapse once more than 20 percent of pedigree records are missing.

Researchers propose an integrated evaluation architecture combining fuzzy cognitive mapping, small-wins tracking and social network analysis to assess participatory socio-technical innovation bundles in agri-food systems.

A three-year field experiment in southern Xinjiang shows that combining organic fertilizer with sodium carboxymethyl cellulose rebuilds sandy soil structure, boosts root vigor and raises cotton yields by up to nearly 17 percent.

Outgoing IPBES Executive Secretary Anne Larigauderie identifies systems thinking, transformative change and business engagement as the scientific priorities needed to accelerate global biodiversity action.

A new framework identifies six distinct value perspectives on soil health, from farm productivity to intrinsic worth, and shows why effective soil policy demands a differentiated mix of instruments rather than a single solution.

Researchers in Türkiye used an explainable machine learning framework combining XGBoost and SHAP to identify age and postpartum diseases as key drivers of delayed first insemination in dairy cows, while candidly reporting limited predictive generalizability.

A metagenomic study of Qinghai–Tibet Plateau grasslands shows that six years of active restoration boosts soil carbon, but the gains accumulate mainly as vulnerable particulate organic carbon shaped by shifts in microbial carbon-degrading genes.

arXiv:2610.11764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable crop-row perception is essential for autonomous agricultural robots, but low-cost deployment is constrained by computation, memory, power, and inference time. This paper addresses crop-row detection and navigation-line extraction using UltraLight Luma, a compact encoder-decoder segmentation network with a progressive learning strategy and only 13.1k trainable parameters. The predicted crop-row masks are processed using a post-processing algorithm to estimate row alignment for downstream visual servoing. UltraLight Luma improves parameter efficiency over U-Net, YOLOv8, and YOLOv26 while maintaining reliable crop-row detection performance. The model required only 25.23 mJ per inference, demonstrating its suitability for resource-constrained agricultural robots.

Researchers have developed a protocol that uses host species distribution models and biodiversity monitoring principles to strategically prioritize where and what to sample in wildlife disease surveillance.

Researchers have welded biodegradable PBAT powder inside graphene oxide aerogels using heat alone to create solvent-free porous scaffolds that hold 70 percent polyethylene glycol and leak less than 2 percent over 100 thermal cycles.

A new three-model ensemble framework combining DAYCENT, DNDC, and ECOSYS predicts US corn and soybean yields and soil organic carbon stocks more accurately than any individual model, offering a robust foundation for national carbon accounting.

A new meta-analysis of broiler trials shows that caprylic acid, a fatty acid from coconut oil, cuts Campylobacter jejuni in chickens by nearly three log units when delivered in feed at moderate doses, without harming growth.

Armed conflict accelerates cropland loss, and the effects can persist for years after conflict begins and vary substantially with conflict severity and social conditions, according to a new study published in Nature Food on Sept. 24.

A carboxylesterase from Bacillus halotolerans outperforms known enzymes at converting the PET breakdown products BHET and MHET into terephthalic acid, offering a new blueprint for enzymatic plastic recycling.

Researchers propose Functional Trait Capacity, a mechanistic metric that predicts how much biodiversity a landscape could sustain under different management, revealing hidden ecological potential that species counts and habitat metrics cannot detect.

A year of measurements in Madrid's parks shows that soil moisture, not temperature, controls CO2 emissions from Mediterranean urban soils, overturning the standard exponential temperature model.

A new theoretical study shows that self-organized vegetation patterns can stabilize plant–pollinator mutualisms, allowing coexistence under environmental stress that would otherwise cause collapse.

A two-season field trial in Valencia shows industrially composted rice straw and sewage sludge improves citrus orchard soil fertility and can partially replace mineral phosphorus fertiliser without reducing yield or fruit quality.

Biodiversity indicators can help companies make more sustainable decisions. But only 9% of the world's largest companies in sectors with a major impact on biodiversity use such indicators, according to a new study from Lund University. The researchers also show that different indicators can lead to different conclusions and present seven recommendations for how they should be used.

A new editorial defends the JASMINE trial's finding that exclusive human milk-based diets improved growth in Japanese very low birth weight infants, arguing the study was designed to answer a Japan-specific regulatory and clinical question rather than isolate fortifier effects.

A new study in Plant and Soil shows that the foliar fungus Epichloë festucae reshapes bacterial and fungal communities across soil aggregate size fractions in ryegrass fields, altering diversity gradients, network complexity and stability.

A comprehensive review finds that AI, IoT sensors, remote sensing and precision fertilisation can dramatically raise nitrogen use efficiency, yield prediction accuracy and farm profitability in the dryland mixed crop-livestock systems that feed hundreds of millions of people.

A new study shows that routine urban herbicide spraying in Ghana kills the Danaid eggfly butterfly directly and stresses its host plant, disrupting plant–insect interactions in city environments.

A greenhouse experiment in semi-arid grassland communities shows that richer arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal communities reduce overall plant biomass yet disproportionately benefit forb species over grasses, challenging assumptions behind commercial fungal inoculants.

A landmark synthesis of 423 studies and over 200,000 data points shows that biodiversity strengthens most ecosystem functions and services worldwide, with oceanic carbon sequestration exceptionally sensitive and pest regulation forecast to decline fastest in fast-growing, low-development countries.

Nitrogen is essential for life. It's needed to build proteins, DNA and many other components of cells. Although nitrogen gas makes up almost 80% of Earth's atmosphere, most organisms cannot use it directly. Certain microbes solve this problem through a process called nitrogen fixation, which converts nitrogen gas into ammonia. This process is carried out by an enzyme called nitrogenase.

A new bibliometric review charts how Brazilian soil computed tomography evolved from homemade gamma-ray scanners in 1985 to synchrotron imaging today, revealing a mature, internationally connected research field with outsized impact on tropical agriculture and climate science.

A landmark landscape genetics study of 243 Guinea baboons reveals that intensive monoculture farming severs gene flow across West Africa, while rivers and heterogeneous habitats keep populations connected.

A five-year field and laboratory study shows that incorporating half of the harvested rice straw boosts paddy soil fertility while adding only about 3 percent to global warming potential, thanks to methane-oxidizing and nitrous oxide-consuming microbes.

Fermenting whole-wheat dough with specific Bacillus subtilis strains rebuilds the gluten network, softens steamed buns, and reduces off-odors, according to a new study in npj Science of Food.

A new study links satellite-derived vegetation and soil moisture anomalies with farmer surveys across four Nigerian states, showing that these indicators improve drought impact monitoring for rainfed rice yields beyond what rainfall indices alone can achieve.

A study of 360 Brown Swiss cows shows that the dry period and early lactation are the most metabolically stressful phases of the production cycle, with novel adipokines and the ER stress marker GRP78 offering new early-warning biomarkers for herd health.

The Canadian government launched its first National Food Security Strategy in June 2026. The strategy aims to invest $750 million to increase year-round Canadian production of fruits and vegetables, including on so-called vertical farms.

The new research should act as a tool for food companies when building the next consumer purchasing journey. The post Regen-organic food can be ‘measurably more nutritious,’ says new research from Edacious and ROA appeared first on AgFunderNews.

Do people eat insects when there is nothing else to eat? Are insects really "food for the poor" or famine food?

A new national framework coupling cropland health, productivity, and connectivity identifies 14.67 percent of China's farmland for managed fallow, concentrating urgent zones in the north and remediation zones in the south.

A new evidence map of 72 studies shows that remote sensing reliably tracks surface-expressed forest soil damage from wildfire and harvesting, while subsurface degradation still requires field measurement.

A localized convolutional neural network trained on ASCAT satellite radar data outperforms the operational soil moisture product and, during heavy rainfall events, can detect how soil moisture changes within a single day.

A large metagenomic study of Iowa homes finds that bedroom dust contains more antimicrobial resistance genes when residences sit closer to intensive livestock operations.

A calibrated watershed model shows that combining irrigation, high-density planting and improved maize hybrids can raise yields and stabilise them against drought while curbing soil erosion in the Mollisol granaries of China and the United States.

Walk into the quality office of almost any established food plant and you’ll find years of batch records.

A sweeping analysis of nearly 146,000 US food and beverage launches finds that on-package claims frequently fail to reflect, and sometimes contradict, a product's overall nutritional quality.

A new study shows that three years of air-dried storage nearly doubled water-extractable organic carbon in archived soils, casting doubt on a popular soil health indicator.

A large Czech field study of 519 dairy cows finds that farm and lactation stage dominate milk composition and metabolic indicators, while five lipogenic genes play only a minor role and milk BHB emerges as a practical herd-level marker of ketosis risk.

Timed foliar sprays made from weed-derived bio-formulations increased fruit set, yield, quality and leaf nutrients in high-density 'Gala Schniga Schnico' apple orchards, a two-year Indian field study found.

A new study in Nigeria's Guinea Savanna shows that machine learning algorithms, led by Cubist, dramatically outperform traditional Ordinary Kriging for mapping soil clay content using satellite and terrain data.

Researchers in Morocco have isolated five salt-tolerant Pseudomonas strains from the roots of a wild coastal legume that dramatically boost plant biomass and could help restore degraded saline soils.

A two-strain bacterial consortium combining Bacillus subtilis SL-44 and Klebsiella oxytoca RS-5 boosts rapeseed growth through both direct plant stimulation and a reshaping of the rhizosphere microbiome, according to a new study in Plant and Soil.

A new study of 109 little free-tailed bats in Eswatini reveals highly individual gut microbiomes rich in potential bacterial pathogens such as Mycoplasma and Salmonella, yet surprisingly unresponsive to agricultural land cover change.

The DNA Series: This is the last blog in the DNA Series (boo!), and we’re delving into the world of gene editing. For this series, … The post DNA Series: Gene Editing appeared first on SAIFood.

A 27-year analysis of British Columbia's commercial salmon fisheries shows that the stabilising portfolio effect of biodiversity extends from fish populations through catches, prices and revenues, though synchronised Chinook declines reveal hidden vulnerabilities.

BIOAGRI 2026 was held in Hyderabad, bringing together industry leaders, scientists, researchers, startups and policymakers to discuss biological agriculture and smart farming. The summit focused on soil health, biological solutions, scientific innovation, investment opportunities, emerging technologies and sustainable agriculture, highlighting the growing role of biological solutions in India’s agricultural future.

Researchers have identified a novel microRNA, miR65, that represses the transcription factor MsbZIP11 and acts as a key negative regulator of saline-alkali stress tolerance in alfalfa by coordinating photosynthesis, sugar accumulation, and redox homeostasis.

First-principles calculations reveal that a new boron-carbon-nitride monolayer remains stable under wide tensile strain while its bandgap, light absorption, and exciton binding energy can be tuned for optoelectronic applications.

A thirteen-month greenhouse experiment shows that potassium locked in clay minerals supplied up to 74 percent of alfalfa's uptake in alkaline Mediterranean soils, revealing that standard exchangeable-potassium soil tests dramatically underestimate the nutrient truly available to crops.

arXiv:2610.08807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precision pesticide spraying is essential for optimizing application efficiency and ensuring uniform chemical distribution. Spraying performance is influenced by multiple factors, including environmental conditions such as temperature and wind speed, pesticide type, and the robot's capability to accurately perceive crops and target spray locations. Existing approaches predominantly emphasize crop detection and rely on predefined spraying parameters, whereas human operators dynamically adjust their spraying strategies by considering environmental conditions, region-specific crop characteristics, and the type of pesticide being applied. In this study, we propose a context-aware adaptive spraying framework based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which enables robots to leverage spatial reasoning and integrate information from multiple sources, including crop type, pesticide type, and weather data, to make adaptive and optimized spraying

A high-throughput phenotyping study shows that mixtures of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi produce additive, synergistic, and antagonistic effects on tomato growth and disease resistance that cannot be predicted from single-isolate performance.

High-resolution mapping in a subtropical Chinese forest reveals that patchy soil sodium is a dominant, previously overlooked driver of tree species richness, with effects that hinge on mycorrhizal type and tree size.

Researchers used explainable machine learning and multi-objective optimization to design a biodegradable Zn–Mg–Li alloy that overcomes the strength–ductility trade-off for medical implants.

Australia can now boast of record amounts of wind farm construction starts this year, but it remains at a standstill in the state that needs it most to replace ageing coal. The post Australian wind farm starts hit record levels, but the technology is dead in the state that needs it most appeared first on Renew Economy.

Crawling through muddy soybean fields to inspect several plant-mounted microphones was not on Emily Sur's graduate school bingo card, but she's not mad about it. Her research offers a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of entomology, agriculture and emerging technologies while still doing what she loves.

Kyoto University researchers used a female-attracted flight interception trap to turn Platycerus stag beetle captures into the first spatially explicit habitat assessment for operational broadleaf forestry.

A two-year field trial in India shows that cutting recommended fertilizer doses by 25 to 50 percent while adding foliar micronutrient sprays improves soil microbial health and produces sweeter, more antioxidant-rich Dashehari mangoes.

Researchers have built a unified scoring framework that combines climate, soil, and groundwater data to assess the health of irrigated farmland in Uzbekistan's Jizzakh Region.

Factors such as sunlight and stage-specific nutrient application determine crop success in urban agriculture, far beyond fixed recipes or miracle solutions. The findings are published in the journal Agronomy for Sustainable Development.

A field study across seventeen German farms shows that organic management boosts masked bee abundance and alters the sex ratios and cuticular lipid chemistry of Hylaeus communis.

At the University of Missouri, plant scientist Ron Mittler is rewriting the playbook for how scientists study life by asking what happens when living organisms face multiple stresses at once.

University of Tennessee researchers are combining plant-derived nanocellulose with metal-organic frameworks to create portable materials that detect and break down pesticide and fertilizer residues under ultraviolet light.

The University of Stirling has won £2.4 million to lead a 48-month transdisciplinary project tackling antimicrobial resistance in Vietnam's pangasius catfish aquaculture industry.

Treating excised Bacopa monnieri plantlets with methyl jasmonate triples bacoside content within 24 hours by switching on key triterpenoid biosynthetic genes, offering a simple post-harvest strategy to boost the medicinal quality of this Ayurvedic memory herb.

Last year saw a "solid breakthrough" in the exports of Russian agricultural technologies, Oksana Lut said

A new study on ancient food production in tropical Belize, co-led by the University of New Mexico and published in Communications Earth & Environment, provides evidence that people in the Maya-speaking region were dedicated farmers thousands of years before the first large villages emerged.

Researchers have encapsulated fragile gardenia yellow pigment inside a zinc L-aspartate bio-metal-organic framework to create a stable solid hybrid pigment that dyes silk with good fastness and added antibacterial and antioxidant properties.

A new study explores what goes on in the brain when mice get high on marijuana

New capital will help Myca widen its geographical footprint across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and India. The post Myca raises $1.3m pre-seed to put AI agents in charge of agribusiness field operations appeared first on AgFunderNews.