From Farm to Table: Exploring the Agricultural Sector

Potato is the most widely grown vegetable crop in the world and yet the most commonly grown potato variety in the US is over 100 years old. One factor limiting genetic gain in potato in the US and Europe is that it's a highly heterozygous clonal autotetraploid. There is global interest in converting potato to a diploid inbred-hybrid crop to allow breeders to take advantage of essential technologies like inbreeding, introgression, and heterosis and providing the option for propagation through botanical seed rather than seed tubers.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major threat to global health and a key One Health challenge linking humans, animals, and the environment. Livestock are a key target for moderation of antimicrobial use (AMU), which is a major driver of AMR in these species. We reviewed both peer-reviewed studies and grey literature from government and industry reports to identify key practices associated with on-farm AMU/AMR for pigs, layer and broiler hens, beef and dairy cattle, sheep, turkeys, and farmed salmon in Europe, and to determine gaps in our collective knowledge. The full review, published in Frontiers in Antibiotics, is available with open access at https://doi.org/10.3389/frabi.2023.1209552

Post-harvest losses are a significant problem worldwide, leading to a waste of resources when they are becoming scarcer. Rather than putting more energy into increasing production volume, addressing post-harvest losses can increase food availability without increasing yields. Using maize in Ethiopia to introduce gendering post-harvest loss research, we analyze the gendered division of labor in post-harvest management and then discuss implications. Without gendering post-harvest loss research, it is possible that gender harms are enacted when women’s livelihoods are impacted in the process of reducing post-harvest losses, and this may compromise food security.

Counting the number of grape bunches at an early stage of development offers relevant information to the winegrower about the potential yield to be harvested. However, manual counting on the fields is laborious and time-consuming. Remote sensing, and more precisely unmanned aerial vehicles mounted with RGB or multispectral cameras, facilitate this task rapidly and accurately. This research paper was performed using the open-source dataset available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108848. It contains 40 RGB videos from a 1.06-ha vineyard located in northern Spain. Moreover, the dataset includes mask labels of visible grape bunches. Lastly, the dataset has already been used to perform grapevine phenotyping in grape bunches and berries: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compag.2023.108051.