Crops

Fertilizers typically contain phosphorous, as it's essential to growing plants. Unfortunately, though, it can become "locked" in the soil, and thus not available to crops. That said, it turns out that the addition of a microbe could unlock it.

Wheat is one of the most widely grown crops, so any increases in its yield could go a long way towards reducing world hunger. That's where a new variety comes in, as its yield is reportedly up to 11 percent higher than that of regular wheat.

If you want to know the local soil conditions, it would be good if you could just ask an earthworm. Given that that's an impossibility, though, scientists are now working on the next-best thing – earthworm-inspired soil-analyzing agricultural robots.

Although there are now a few different crop-spraying multicopter drones, fixed-wing drones are faster and have a longer battery range. That's where the recently US-certified autonomous electric Pelican crop duster comes into the picture.

In order to keep water from evaporating from the soil, farmers often cover the ground around their crop plants with sheets of polyethylene plastic. There could soon be a more eco-friendly alternative, though, in the form of soybean oil-coated sand.

While crop-spraying drones do have advantages over full-size piloted aircraft, they're limited by their battery range. Dutch startup Drone4Agro is developing a solution to that problem, though, in the form of a range-extended electric multicopter.

We've already heard about drones that spray crops with herbicides and fertilizers. The AeroSeeder is a bit different, however, in that (as you might have guessed) it disperses seeds that might otherwise be difficult to plant.

Powdery mildew is a widespread fungal disease that attacks many crops. And while it typically has to be treated using fungicides, special ultraviolet light-emitting robots could soon prove to be a better way to go.

GMOs in food are subject to some tight regulations. Now, researchers at North Carolina State University have created a new version of CRISPR that lets scientists edit crops without introducing new DNA, meaning they technically aren’t GMOs.

Geneticists at Penn State University have manipulated the expression of one gene in a plant that makes them more resilient to environmental change – and found that this is passed down to future generations.

Semi-transparent solar cells could be built into the glass roof panels of greenhouses, capturing light at wavelengths that plants don’t use anyway. Models suggest that in some cases these greenhouses could become completely self-sufficient.

Despite the fact that corn is one of the world's most commonly-grown crops, it still doesn't tolerate cold temperatures well. That could be about to change, though, as scientists have developed a hardier strain.