One way of increasing crop productivity is to increase the amount of grain or other harvestable product that is actually harvested from the plant. To that end scarecrows  were invented by human beings, although their success in that regard is inconsistent at best (is there a scientific study on the effectiveness of scarecrows just waiting [...]

The contentious matter of plant GM (genetic manipulation – which always sounds more menacing and mankind-meddling-with-nature than GE, genetic engineering, or the other GM – genetic modification…) has been put in the spotlight recently with Gilles-Eric Séralini et al.’s paper. Entitled ‘Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize’, it [...]

Congratulations are in order to the John Innes Centre (Norwich, UK) for its recent award of nearly US$10m ‘to test the feasibility of developing cereal crops capable of fixing nitrogen as an environmentally-sustainable approach for small farmers in sub-Saharan Africa to increase maize yields’. The funding – curiously, for 5 years and 1 month – [...]

Unlike ‘Audrey 2’ – the plant which ate members of the cast from ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’ (botanically suspect but with some good songs) – the maize seed grows on the cob by extracting goodies from the mother plant. YouTube has a great video of a production of Little Shop of Horrors: Feed me Seymour [...]

Not content with just being grateful for all of the marvellous things that plants do and provide, we humans always seem to want them to do even more. Well, in that vein there has been a veritable avalanche of stories that exploit the impressive chemical synthetic abilities of plants. Moran Farhi et al. have managed to [...]

This is a video of a flour mill with two stones in a small shop outside the gates of Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, India. The film shows the grain being poured into the hoppers above the stones, and then going between the millstones. From one stone set, the brown/wholemeal flour goes into sacks; in the [...]

Processes regulating pollen germination, growth, guidance and sperm delivery are considered major hybridization controls in nature and contribute to reproductive success as well as to isolation and speciation. Dresselhaus et al. show how maize (Zea mays) can be developed as a model to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of these processes. Focusing on this species, they [...]