Today, agriculture finds itself facing a major challenge: Ensuring adequate production for a growing population all while protecting the environment. To limit the expansion of agricultural land, a possible path forward is increasing crop density (plants planted per square meter), which has the consequence of increasing competition of plants among themselves for resources (water, light, […]
France’s Ecophyto II plan (which aims to reduce the use of pesticides in agriculture) gives a large amount of consideration to scientific expertise. Since 2012, different research projects have been carried out to develop alternatives to phytosanitary products for crops. This includes the LILLA project, led by a French agricultural and environmental research center in […]
On January 1, 2020, the National Institute of Agricultural Research and the National Institute of Research in Sciences and Technologies for the Environment and Agriculture merged to become a new and unique research institute: INRAE, the “National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment,” It was officially launched January 9. Thanks to the complementarity […]
The reconciliation of crop productivity and biodiversity maintenance is one of the most important challenges of global agriculture. Weed management is recognized as an integral component of ecological intensification in agriculture because weeds can generate severe yield losses but also form the base of trophic networks in agriculture. Research in weed science has thus often […]
Through participatory science, researchers call on society to help them collect, sort and sometimes even analyze data. This fieldwork, sometimes time-consuming, is essential for all scientific research, and is made easier thanks to digital technology. Websites and smartphone applications now allow to create direct links between researchers and citizens: Photos, GPS coordinates, observations, etc. Everyone […]
Grapes vines are sensitive to numerous fungal and viral diseases that need to be controlled for in order to get a quality grape harvest. This are typically treated for using chemical methods, which makes viticulture the second highest user of phytosanitary products in France after cereals. Despite its effectiveness, this protection method can have undesirable […]
An international team composed in part by researchers from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), has succeeded in forming the first sequencing of the pea genome. Other than providing a better understanding of the genome of this plant compared to that of other legumes, will help improve certain characteristics of interest in peas, […]
Agricultural intensification and the destruction of semi-natural landscapes (field copses, hedges, buffer strips, etc.) is one of the primary causes of current biodiversity loss. While reconverting cultivated lands to semi-natural landscapes is often difficult in many areas, increasing the complexity of the crop mosaic by decreasing field size and/or increasing the diversity of planted crops […]
A team of French researchers, some of them from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, has just shown for the first time that organic agriculture benefits honey bee colonies feeding particularly during the period of food scarcity at the end of spring. The research team analyzed six years of data collected as part of […]
Since June 2019, a new social network allows farmers to connect to one another and to exchange, particularly around their practices: Farmr. How does this new French platform work? In December 2017, Baptist Létocart founded his business Farmr with his associate Thomas Camboulive. “I am from an agricultural background, my colleague comes from the digital […]