Tag Archives: sugar beet

Spurring Sweet Success

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Thanks to Michigan State University, a sweet partnership has helped resurrect Michigan’s $444 million sugar beet industry.

In 1996 the industry was in peril. Yields hit an all-time low due to pest, disease and production issues that greatly reduced crop health. Farmers were looking to get out of sugar beet farming and switch to more profitable crops. Industry representatives reached out to MSU to help solve the problem. (more…)

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It Takes a Community of Soil Microbes to Protect Plants From Disease

*Berkeley Lab scientists decipher immune system for plants beneath our feet*

Those vegetables you had for dinner may have once been protected by an immune system akin to the one that helps you fight disease. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Netherland’s Wageningen University found that plants rely on a complex community of soil microbes to defend themselves against pathogens, much the way mammals harbor a raft of microbes to avoid infections.

The scientists deciphered, for the first time, the group of microbes that enables a patch of soil to suppress a plant-killing pathogen. Previous research on the phenomenon of disease-suppressive soil had identified one or two pathogen-fighting microbes at work. (more…)

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