Most plant-based foods we eat today are a product of innovative plant breeding programs. Careful choice of plant parents is followed by a multitude of intentional, hand-pollinated blooms. These result in thousands […]
Plant genebanks, such as the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS), conserve vast collections of crops. They are saved for use in breeding and research programs. These collections are primarily conserved as […]
There is a humble, wild chile pepper that grows in Arizona. Commonly called chiltepín, it is the wild relative of hundreds of domesticated pepper varieties grown (and eaten) all over the world. […]
Flaxseed is one of humanity’s oldest, and most widely adopted multi-use crops. For over ten thousand years, the oil-rich seeds have been an important source of nutrition for both humans and livestock. […]
Ripe, juicy tomatoes are one of the hallmarks of a summer picnic – and a key ingredient in salads and the classic BLT. Like many of our modern crops, today’s tomatoes have […]
When it comes to crop yield, most of us are concerned with what it will look like at harvest time. How many kilograms of a harvest can we expect – and when. […]
Every food-related action you take calls a world into being. We call this world the food system, and it is a vast network of farms, fisheries, processors, manufacturers, stores, restaurants, and home […]
Most of us associate cotton with its fiber. A by-product of cotton fiber production is the leftover seeds. One item that can be made from the seed is cottonseed oil, but that […]
It may surprise you to learn that wild potatoes grow like weeds in South America. While farmers in the United States battle weeds like pigweed and lamb’s quarters, farmers in the Andes […]
We are all familiar with human partnerships of many kinds, both mundane and fictional. In the mundane category is your typical carpool. In the fictional category are superheroes working together to save […]