An international team led by scientists at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich,UK, have transferred broad spectrum resistance against some important plant diseases across different plant families. This breakthrough provides a new way to produce crops with sustainable resistance to economically important diseases.

Earlier this month, Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, admitted that its genetically engineered "Bt" (bacillus thuringiensis) cotton seed wasn't all that farmers in India had hoped. Reports coming in from four districts of India's Gujarat state indicated that the company's seeds had not been able to prevent a pest called th...

Geraniums may hold the key to controlling the devastating Japanese beetle, which feeds on nearly 300 plant species and costs the ornamental plant industry $450 million in damage each year, according to scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The beetle, Popillia japonica Newman, can feast on a wide variety of plants, ...

A naturally occurring class of plant hormones called cytokinins has been found to help increase cotton yields during drought conditions, according to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists. Cytokinins promote cell division and growth in plants. In cotton, cytokinins stimulate the growth of the main plant stem and branches. Commercially...

The West Australian State Opposition Agriculture Spokesman, Mick Murray, is calling on the State Government to introduce labelling on products containing genetically modified food. He is urging the public to make submissions to a nationwide Independent Review of Food Labelling and Products being conducted by the Council of Australian Governmen...

The American Farm Bureau announced this week that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether a lower court acted hastily and incorrectly by banning the cultivation of biotech alfalfa despite extensive scientific evidence documenting the safety of the crop. A coalition of agricultural organizations, including the American Farm Bureau, filed on ...

During field monitoring of the 2009 cotton crop in the state of Gujarat in western India, Monsanto and Mahyco scientists detected unusual survival of pink bollworm to first-generation single-protein Bollgard cotton. Testing was conducted to assess for resistance to Cry1Ac, the Bt protein in Bollgard cotton, and pink bollworm resistance to Cry...

GM crops have, for many years, been a source of controversy in the EU. After a six year effective moratorium on new approvals, a revised regulatory system finally began to function in 2004. However, since then, the only crops approved have been soy and maize varieties for import. Now, after a 12 year gap, and 13 years after the original dossi...

MANHATTAN, Kan. — To feed a world population projected to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, technology that can enhance food production will be a significant asset. Dramatically increased food prices around the world in recent years, social unrest over food scarcity in countries like Argentina, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mozambique and many other...

Last week the European Commission approved cultivation and processing of the genetically modified starch potato Amflora. The request for authorisation was submitted by Amflora's developer BASF in August 1996, more than 13 years ago! The scope of the application included cultivation, industrial use and the use of pulp as feed.

If you live outside the farm belt you might have missed what is shaping up to be one of the biggest antitrust stories of the year: widespread allegations that Monsanto is engaging in anticompetitive conduct in the biotech seed market. The Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (to say nothing of at least seven state attorneys general...

Western Australia has become a GM crop state with approval by the State Government to allow the introduction of GM canola to farms across the state. In parliament, the Liberal Government of Western Australia used its numbers to defeat the Labor’s disallowance motion opposing permitting GM canola to be grown in the stat, despite earlier d...

Crop biotechnology giant Monsanto Co. has the most at stake in the first of an unprecedented series of public meetings that the antitrust wing of the Justice Department is holding across the Farm Belt. In January, the Justice Department launched a formal antitrust investigation of the St. Louis company's handling of the most widely planted gen...

Monsanto’s new GE lines could contaminate Canadian crops if approved for commercialization in the U.S., say critics Canadian farmers are worried that a ruling prohibiting the planting of genetically engineered alfalfa in the United States may soon be overturned. Several farmer and consumer groups are urging the U.S. Department of Agricul...

Iowa crop farmers are battling an old problem with potentially new and devastating repercussions for the entire state’s agricultural economy: Herbicide-resistant weeds. The phenomenon is not all that new, said Mike Owen, a weed specialist at Iowa State University who has been discussing herbicide-r...

A naturally occurring class of plant hormones called cytokinins has been found to help increase cotton yields during drought conditions, according to Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists. Cytokinins promote cell division and growth in plants. In cotton, cytokinins stimulate the growth of the main plant stem and branches. Commercially...