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Battling a soy pest
Apr 27, 2012
Part of the Food For the Future initiative is to provide safe, healthy, affordable food solutions. This story focuses on a Mizzou researcher who is developing healthy treatment for a very important food for the future: soy.
From CAFNRnews
University of Missouri plant pathologist Melissa Mitchum and colleagues at Iowa State University and North Carolina State University recently received a $466,000 grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to continue their research on protecting soybeans from nematode parasites, which cause $1.3 billion annually in soybean crop losses in the U.S.
“While consumers may not realize the nematode could be a threat to their food supply, it is,” said Mitchum, an investigator at MU’s Bond Life Sciences Center and CAFNR’s Division of Plant Sciences. “The research in our lab is aimed directly at stopping the nematode, thus helping to avert increases in consumer prices and potential food shortages.”
Americans rarely see soybeans on their plates, but soybeans account for two-thirds of the world’s animal feed and more than half the edible oil consumed in the U.S., according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). More…