science Tuesday

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is a disease that costs the U.S. pork industry an estimated $664 million per year. Recently, scientists have made a breakthrough in research efforts to curb the disease.

A consortium of scientists from around the country, with funding from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and Agricultural Research Service (ARS), have discovered a genetic marker in pigs that identifies whether or not a pig has reduced susceptibility to PRRS.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

In recent years, wildfires have become larger and more severe. After the fires, large areas are without protective vegetative cover, making them prone to soil erosion when rains come. The forest soils contain many plant seeds, but the soils need to be stabilized until these seeds have a chance to germinate and re-establish plant cover that can stabilize the soil.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

As part of the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative called Feed the Future, USDA is building collaborative scientific partnerships with nearly a dozen organizations that will help U.S. and African goat producers enhance goat breeding and productivity.

Feed the Future is part of a multilateral effort launched at the L’Aquila World Summit on Food Security in 2009 to accelerate progress toward the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and suffering from hunger by 2015.  The program enables affected governments and their people to take the lead in developing and implementing food security solutions. These “country-driven” strategies give ownership and accountability, while tackling the root causes of hunger and poverty. Working with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), USDA offers strong competencies in capacity development, food assistance, research and technology transfer in support of Feed the Future.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

This week marks the 19^th year of World Water Day. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development designated this day as an annual international event focusing on the importance of sustaining and managing fresh water resources.  This year’s theme is water and food security.  This is such a critical issue to not only to our international friends, but also for U.S. farmers, ranchers, growers, consumers, and conservationists.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

One of the keys to improving biofuel production is to understand how plants are made and function. Two researchers from the University of Georgia (UGA)  have made strides in understanding how plant cell walls are made, opening a new door to converting plants to biofuels and other carbon-based products.

UGA researcher Debra Mohnen and her team discovered that two proteins (GAUT1 and GAUT7) come together in an unexpected way to make a carbohydrate, or a chain of sugar molecules, in plant cell walls. The work was funded through USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

This is National Agriculture Week, an annual event that gives us a chance to honor the 3 million plus farmers and ranchers across the United States who work hard each day so that we have healthy and nutritious food on our plates. From the last Census of Agriculture in 2007, we learned that the number of farmers is actually growing. But how do we know that USDA is keeping pace with their needs?

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

Food chemistry is the study of the chemical processes and interactions that happen within our foods.  By examining different components like water, starches and fats found in foods, we can learn how to enhance or prevent different natural and unnatural chemical reactions from happening in our food.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

Earlier this month, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), released the latest count of farms in the United States. The nation has nearly 2.2 million farms, a number that has held pretty steady for the past decade. While this number is important, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

Developing a rapid, inexpensive biosensor to detect salmonella on vegetables; expanding understanding of the antimicrobial properties of nutmeg; finding a non-invasive method to test for glucose levels. 

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

Understanding the causes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural landscapes is truly a multi-scale challenge, with GHG sources ranging from whole plant, to the microscopic microbe level.  For example, denitrification, the production of nitrous oxide, is the result of the action of just a few unique enzymes produced by a small number of bacteria and fungi in the soil.  These small players have huge importance because nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Increases in nitrous oxide and other GHGs have been implicated in major global changes such as increased mean annual temperatures, resulting in melting glaciers, increasing floods, and more frequent heat waves.